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It's very small, fast, and uses little memory. It's easy to learn and easy to interop with C. It's got two great implementations, with one (LuaJIT) probably h
by eric_bullington 14y ago
It's very small, fast, and uses little memory. It's easy to learn and easy to interop with C. It's got two great implementations, with one (LuaJIT) probably holding the top spot among all dynamic, garbage-collected language currently in existence, measured by performance (although the creator -- `mikep` on HN -- is very careful to avoid making this sort of claim).
It's also got one of the coolest GUI toolkits around in IUP. If you've ever wondered by a cross-platform GUI toolkit that uses native widgets has to be so huge and complex, IUP's what you're looking for. Unfortunately, IUP doesn't yet have a native OSX driver, but you can use motif graphics driver to build a program that will run on OSX. Like Lua, IUP's in portable C, so a number of other languages have built bindings, notably go and perl. Like Lua, IUP has a very liberal license license (MIT), so you can use it for commercial projects without worrying about dynamic or static linking.
- arundelo 14y agoCorrection: LuaJIT's creator Mike Pall is http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikemike http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikemike .
- eric_bullington 14y agoThanks for the correction. I should have verified the HN username for Mike; not sure where I pulled `mikep` out of since I always enjoy reading his comments here and elsewhere. It's too late for me to correct it in my original comment, so thanks again.
- swah 14y agoHe's mikemike on reddit as well.
- snogglethorpe 14y agoIUP seems cool in theory, but in practice, I've never even been able to compile/install it, despite trying multiple times over the years! Unfortunately the build system seems to be mostly of the "Works great on the author's system!" sort... >< I always try a bit to hack around the issues, but the problems have always exceeded my "oh this is too annoying, I'll try again next year" threshold (part of the problem being that it's an unusual build system, not just a few Makefiles, so it's less familiar).
- eric_bullington 14y agoI just noticed your comment, so sorry for the belated reply. I just wanted to mention that the tecgraf, makers of IUP, has thankfully simplified their build system -- no more custom build system. Also, they've started releasing pre-built binaries for all major OSs, including Linux and OSX. So now it's as easy and downloading a file and running sudo ./install. And if you want to build it yourself, it's as simple as running a few make files (make; make install each for the IUP, CD, and IM libraries). But absolutely, the first time I tried to use IUP a few years ago, I couldn't get it build due to the complexity of the build system. Fortunately, that's all changed now.