15 ms·

I think this mostly has to do with the 'Batteries -not- included' approach of Lua. This is mainly done to keep the language/vm compact and embeddable, yet what

I think this mostly has to do with the 'Batteries -not- included' approach of Lua. This is mainly done to keep the language/vm compact and embeddable, yet what it leads to is many similar implementations of modules that do not play well together.

manveru 16y ago
I read a related article a while back: http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-... It's interesting to draw parallels to Lua, they both started out as embedded scripting languages with a small core.
- davidw 16y ago
  Great article:-) I think managing the addition of batteries is definitely tricky for a language like Lua. Some of its users do not want any additional baggage: they want small, fast and easy to embed. Other people may want to use it as a 'scripting language', and thus want to have a bunch of libraries and additional goodies to get stuff done with.
extension 16y ago
This. Lua doesn't even have a standard class/inheritance model. If you want that, you implement it in-language. There are some nice general purpose ones out there, but nothing canonical. If someone makes a killer web framework on top of one of these models, that might establish the standard and bootstrap the Lua scene, kind of like how Rails established a lot of idioms for Ruby.
- draegtun 16y ago
  re: makes a killer web framework There have been two Ruby web framework ported to Lua: * Orbit (http://orbit.luaforge.net/ http://orbit.luaforge.net/) - Camping port * Mercury (http://github.com/nrk/mercury http://github.com/nrk/mercury) - Sinatra port
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    There's also Kepler (http://www.keplerproject.org/ http://www.keplerproject.org/), which I haven't used, and WSAPI (http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/ http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/), which is roughly like Rack or WSGI. It's not a "web framework", but using WSAPI with FastCGI works well for CGI-ish stuff.

manveru 16y ago

I read a related article a while back: http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-... It's interesting to draw parallels to Lua, they both started out as embedded scripting languages with a small core.

davidw 16y ago
Great article:-) I think managing the addition of batteries is definitely tricky for a language like Lua. Some of its users do not want any additional baggage: they want small, fast and easy to embed. Other people may want to use it as a 'scripting language', and thus want to have a bunch of libraries and additional goodies to get stuff done with.

extension 16y ago

This. Lua doesn't even have a standard class/inheritance model. If you want that, you implement it in-language. There are some nice general purpose ones out there, but nothing canonical. If someone makes a killer web framework on top of one of these models, that might establish the standard and bootstrap the Lua scene, kind of like how Rails established a lot of idioms for Ruby.

draegtun 16y ago
re: makes a killer web framework There have been two Ruby web framework ported to Lua: * Orbit (http://orbit.luaforge.net/ http://orbit.luaforge.net/) - Camping port * Mercury (http://github.com/nrk/mercury http://github.com/nrk/mercury) - Sinatra port
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  There's also Kepler (http://www.keplerproject.org/ http://www.keplerproject.org/), which I haven't used, and WSAPI (http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/ http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/), which is roughly like Rack or WSGI. It's not a "web framework", but using WSAPI with FastCGI works well for CGI-ish stuff.