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> ... user bases and ecosystem, and in my very humble opinion Lua spectacularly fails at both. I think that call depends on your use case. If you've ever tried

> ... user bases and ecosystem, and in my very humble opinion Lua spectacularly fails at both. I think that call depends on your use case. If you've ever tried embedding v8 or spidermonkey you might have a different opinion. For instance we use to run the entire game state for multiple game titles I worked on in Lua. This was on the PSP where we only had a 400kb block of execution space and a 333MHz MIPS processor(system memory was 8mb w/ 24mb for video + audio). Those types of environments are where Lua shines which lets you use a scripting language that scales from nothing up to full-blown systems.

lifthrasiir 10y ago
> I think that call depends on your use case. If you've ever tried embedding v8 or spidermonkey you might have a different opinion. I'm saying this in the embedded perspective (my professional involvement with Lua was primarily in that form). The lack of package manager might be acceptable as an embedded language---the lack of quality library isn't. The embedded story masks the weakness in the ecosystem because you can somehow make everything from scratch, but when you are programming at large the story becomes a disaster (combined with common symptom of dynamically and weakly typed languages). I don't doubt Lua is a good language to embed. I doubt Lua is a good language to write a large software, especially after having worked with more than 300K lines of Lua code in a single code base.
- vvanders 10y ago
  I thing any dynamic language starts falling over at that scale. Lua, JS and the like make great glue and logic bridges but I won't want to use them across the whole stack.
  - lifthrasiir 10y ago
    I first mention that JS has been actually successful in non-glue areas :) Dynamic languages are hard to scale, but it is possible after some headaches. The lack of quality library also means that you are even more risky when you are writing a small program (because you have less incentive to write it yourself). I have experienced multiple times that even the existing libraries (including the standard ones) had crucial flaws and no one seems to be bothered to fix that. Also in the embedded setting the use of snippets, rather than proper libraries, are more common as libraries can be harder to integrate, and unfortunately we are left with PHP-esque lua-users.org for Lua...

lifthrasiir 10y ago

> I think that call depends on your use case. If you've ever tried embedding v8 or spidermonkey you might have a different opinion. I'm saying this in the embedded perspective (my professional involvement with Lua was primarily in that form). The lack of package manager might be acceptable as an embedded language---the lack of quality library isn't. The embedded story masks the weakness in the ecosystem because you can somehow make everything from scratch, but when you are programming at large the story becomes a disaster (combined with common symptom of dynamically and weakly typed languages). I don't doubt Lua is a good language to embed. I doubt Lua is a good language to write a large software, especially after having worked with more than 300K lines of Lua code in a single code base.

vvanders 10y ago
I thing any dynamic language starts falling over at that scale. Lua, JS and the like make great glue and logic bridges but I won't want to use them across the whole stack.
- lifthrasiir 10y ago
  I first mention that JS has been actually successful in non-glue areas :) Dynamic languages are hard to scale, but it is possible after some headaches. The lack of quality library also means that you are even more risky when you are writing a small program (because you have less incentive to write it yourself). I have experienced multiple times that even the existing libraries (including the standard ones) had crucial flaws and no one seems to be bothered to fix that. Also in the embedded setting the use of snippets, rather than proper libraries, are more common as libraries can be harder to integrate, and unfortunately we are left with PHP-esque lua-users.org for Lua...