Re: ​Dead Batteries

[Paul K <paul@...>]

Hi Gavin,

> 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).

winapi provides set_clipboard/get_clipoard methods
(http://stevedonovan.github.io/winapi/api.html#set_clipboard). I
didn't test it with textadept, but don't see why it wouldn't work
there.

> Attempts to find a library to allow cut and paste to the windows clipboard in textadept-curses (Lua 5.3) prompted my mail.

I confirmed that winapi compiles with Lua 5.3

> 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/).

I do this to some degree in ZeroBrane Studio distribution, but only
for a small set of libraries (lpeg, lfs, luasec, and luasocket). These
libraries are compiled for Lua 5.1-5.3 on Windows/macOS/Linux. I also
package wx/winapi for Lua 5.1, but these can be compiled for Lua 5.2
and 5.3 as well using the included scripts.

> 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)

Ideally modules need to be updated to support new(er) versions of Lua,
but if there is no easy way to update them, I wonder if something like
twoface (http://corsix.github.io/twoface/) can be helpful if extended
to cover Lua 5.3+. I used it with Lua 5.2 on a quite complex libraries
(wx/wxlua) without any noticeable issues.

Paul.

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 5:42 AM Gavin Holt <holtgavin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>