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While it would be very nice to have the “Batteries Included” libraries that say, Python has, I can understand the motivation behind not having them. Lua is pretty much meant to be embedded, fast (and it is, not to mention LuaJIT), cooperative with C. This is a completely different focus from Python, Ruby, etc. Lua is very nice to use, and I personally write MoonScript and compile to Lua, so I get some (personal) “benefits” while still having the simplicity of Lua. But it still feels like it isn’t enough.
I wouldn’t discard the idea of an alternative Lua distribution/fork that includes these “batteries” from the language itself and not from 3rd party libraries. Have them be standardized and supported. This would require a lot more of maintenance, for source code, documentation, support, etc. This is something that I don’t think Lua has, we’re not big enough of an userbase, so at the same time it is paradoxical. I would be up for it myself, but I really haven’t got the confidence to touch any C.
As for Q1 I have no idea, but for Q2 I am fairly sure that there’s no *active* distribution of precompiled libraries, not that I heard of at the very least. Many libraries might become obsolete or non-working fairly soon if development goes on like this. We already got a lot of stuff running on 5.1 semantics because things are not updated for 5.3, it would be unfair to think that they are going to catch up fast, so I can’t really predict what is going to happen to those in the near future.
I doubt we will come up with a solution anytime soon, and I’m sure this has been talked trillion times, but I think it’s worth to keep talking about it.
~ Dael
From: Gavin Holt
Sent: December 18, 2019 5:42 AM
To: lua-l@lists.lua.org
Subject: Dead Batteries
Hi,
I love Lua - thank you all. This is the language I recommend to anyone wanting to learn to code - my copy of PIL has been a great tutorial. There are great development environments available in SciTE or Zerobrane, and a nice friendly community.
Lua is well suited to the "non-compiling user", as are many other interpreted languages. The popularity of these scripted languages is in part the ability to use them without learning/maintaining a compiler. However, there is a ceiling to what can be achieved with Lua alone and from that point onwards you need compiled libraries aka "Batteries" (lfs, winapi, rex_pcre, clipboard, afx, lpeg, hunspell, lsqlite, vcl, gslshell). I am very grateful to those who have made compiled libraries for windows available to download, I don't have or want a compiler!
The progress of Lua from 5.1, 5.2 to 5.3 and soon 5.4 has created a problem - many of the previously released pre-complied libraries have not been updated and will not run under 5.3. This will stop many updating beyond Lua5.1/Luajit and for projects that do update their embedded Lua versions user like me will find addons/extensions requiring dlls will no longer work (e.g. SciTE: shell.dll, stubby.dll, gui.dll)
Attempts to find a library to allow cut and paste to the windows clipboard in textadept-curses (Lua 5.3) prompted my mail.
I know the "non-compiling" user may not be the main target audience for Lua, but as a beautiful interpreted language I feel the lack of "Live Batteries" prevents Lua becoming as popular as it should.
Q1. Anyone point me to a 32bit library that will do copy/paste to the windows clipboard and is compatible with textadept-curses (https://foicica.com/textadept/CHANGELOG.html).
Q2. Is there any movement to maintain a distribution of pre-compiled libraries? Perhaps like LuaPower (https://luapower.com/) or better the comprehensive IUP distribution maintained by Antonio Scuri (https://sourceforge.net/projects/iup/files/3.28/).
Kind Regards Gavin Holt