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Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

86 points by MaxScheiber 12y ago

tjkells 12y ago
Can we PLEASE not refer people to penlight anymore? It's half broken, poorly documented, and poorly maintained. It drives me crazy to see it referred to all over the place as a good example of anything. That being said, this is FANTASTIC. Due to the nature of lua it may well always lack a good community but thankfully people seem to be trying.
- georgebashi 12y ago
  Are there alternatives to penlight you'd recommend?
  - tjkells 12y ago
    PL is an enormous library so its really superseded by a few different libraries. The stuff I used most often were the functional tools and Moses (https://github.com/Yonaba/Moses/ https://github.com/Yonaba/Moses/) blows the doors off of PL in that regard.
    - justinmk 12y ago
      Have you looked at luafun? If so, what's your opinion? https://github.com/rtsisyk/luafun https://github.com/rtsisyk/luafun
- LewisJEllis 12y ago
  Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list is to provide an overview of what's out there. As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be reconsidered.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    > Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community Is that for technical reasons or because Lua is commonly used in proprietary apps?
    - LewisJEllis 12y ago
      Not necessarily proprietary apps, but a wide variety of use cases; Lua is embedded in all kinds of different stuff and used for game dev, webdev, embedded scripting, WoW, configuration, and much more, whereas JS, for example, is used in just two main (related) cases. This makes Lua's userbase rather fragmented across these niches.
    - castell 12y ago
      The Lua language and LuaJIT are great. The user base is fragmented (version 4, 5.1 (LuaJIT) vs 5.2), as Lua is usually used as embedded language (alongside C, C++, ...) for video games (World of Warcraft, Far Cry, ...), applications (Adobe Lightroom, ...), etc. And the http://lua.org http://lua.org website is a bit too minimalistic to offer community features. The project only hosts a mailing list and a old-school wiki. The additional libraries are/were hosted on http://luaforge.net http://luaforge.net , an outdated sourceforge clone. The documentation is static and the development process itself is not so open. The Lua language standard library is lacking functions almost every other language ship with their default package (so everyone has to either find & download additional libraries or reinvent the wheel). Other languages like PHP have a documentation that allows the community to add comments and code samples.
      - walterbell 12y ago
        If someone created a community site with editable docs, do you think it would gain traction?
- dayveec 12y ago
  Why do you say that? WRT doco it's one of the better Lua libraries.
- catwell 12y ago
  I disagree strongly with that. Penlight is the closest thing there is to a Lua standard library (loosely modeled after what exists in Python). It is maintained by Steve Donovan who is one of the most active members of the community and the author of http://www.luafaq.org/ http://www.luafaq.org/, LDoc and lake. Having contributed to Penlight myself I can say it is certainly not poorly maintained compared to most other Lua projects. I agree, Penlight is not the best at everything it does, and it probably does too much (which is why there is microlight), but it is still a tool most Lua users need to know about.
spb 12y ago
"awesome-lua" is probably not a good choice of name as the most common association of "awesome" with "Lua" is the Lua-based Awesome window manager.
- LewisJEllis 12y ago
  This is a totally valid point which I considered, but I think the association of awesome-<language> for lists like this is more valuable, since part of the purpose is to make it accessible for people outside the lua world (who probably won't know about awesomeWM anyway).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sander_Marechal 12y ago
    But you make life a lot more difficult for people who do use the Awesome Window Manager, because it becomes much harder for us to find solutions to problems using Google for instance.
    - klibertp 12y ago
      Just add "wm" to your queries...
    - LewisJEllis 12y ago
      'awesome-lua' is not typically a phrase/term referring to the Awesome WM. On GitHub, there is only one awesome-wm-related repo by the name `awesome-lua`; it's just one person's configuration and hasn't been updated since 2012. I don't think I'm stepping on anybody's toes here. Typically, the window manager is referred to as either just 'awesome' or as 'awesome wm'. awesome-lua is not a name conflict with 'awesome' or with 'awesome wm', and the worst case for search results is that awesome-lua shows up and bumps everything else down by one spot. As klibertp suggested, adding 'wm' to your query makes awesome-lua not show up at all; claiming that I 'make life a lot more difficult' is rather silly.
- 12y ago
sheetjs 12y ago
There is another awesome-lua list that predates this one: https://github.com/forhappy/awesome-lua https://github.com/forhappy/awesome-lua The "master list": https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
- LewisJEllis 12y ago
  Indeed; I have no claim to originality. The pre-existing list is (extremely) incomplete, and gives a laundry list of outdated and unmaintained libraries which are often not useful or broadly relevant. Such entries dilute the usefulness of all other entries on the list, so I made this version to avoid that (and to be more complete).
degio 12y ago
I wish I had this list when I started programming in Lua.
walterbell 12y ago
Why isn't a search engine sufficient for discovering <foo-language> packages and resources? Historically, human-edited lists don't have a long archival lifetime, e.g. original Yahoo, DMOZ, Mahalo. If curation is better than search, why is a curated list better hosted at github than Wikipedia, which has a lower technical cost of editing? If the problem is Wikipedia moderation, who will reconcile multiple github curated lists? Is the expectation that github's "awesome-xyz" repos will rank higher in Google search results than a curated Wikipedia page? Or is this github-specific SEO?
- pinkyand 12y ago
  Maybe the way to judge curation is by comparing curation+search to search alone. With good curation effort, i think that curation+search is a winner , at a relatively minor cost(needing more time). Also curation has the benefit of being a useful discovery tool.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    In theory, https://www.openhub.net/p?r&q=lua https://www.openhub.net/p?r&q=lua could construct/curate such lists from project activity analytics.
    - pinkyand 12y ago
      Personally i think human curation is much better than curation by activity analytics, and it can offer better context.
      - walterbell 12y ago
        No question. But it usually doesn't last, as people move onto other projects. Even within this thread, the new list is replacing a similarly named, now unmaintained list. DMOZ/Wikipedia at least try to provide long-term continuity and a standardized ontology for discovery. This github list is depending on the searcher already knowing that they should preface their dev discovery queries with "awesome". If this list format were standardized, it could be dynamically merged with data from OpenHub. Or GitHub could add analytics features (similar to OpenHub) to assist the human curator editing this GitHub repo.
luastoned 12y ago
Another site that has a nice overview is http://luapower.com http://luapower.com
alok-g 12y ago
Can someone please recommend a library for music synthesis?
- justincormack 12y ago
  The only thing I came across (not my area) was this http://worp.zevv.nl/ http://worp.zevv.nl/
J_Darnley 12y ago
Your list of section anchor links appears to be broken. I click on any and nothing happens. Otherwise I look forward to browsing it.
- LewisJEllis 12y ago
  Hm, they work fine for me; can you be more specific?
  - J_Darnley 12y ago
    How can I be more specific than "I click on any and nothing happens"? The links must point to non-existent anchors in the page. I'll go have a quick look at the source but I don't know what it can tell me.
castell 12y ago
Some more packages are on the LuaForge list: http://luaforge.net/projects/ http://luaforge.net/projects/ (though LuaForge looks outdated) Thanks for curating the list!
seri 12y ago
Does anybody know a stable Lua package for HTML scraping, preferrably similar to Nokogiri or Beautiful Soup?

86 points by MaxScheiber 12y ago

Can we PLEASE not refer people to penlight anymore? It's half broken, poorly documented, and poorly maintained. It drives me crazy to see it referred to all over the place as a good example of anything. That being said, this is FANTASTIC. Due to the nature of lua it may well always lack a good community but thankfully people seem to be trying.

georgebashi 12y ago
Are there alternatives to penlight you'd recommend?
- tjkells 12y ago
  PL is an enormous library so its really superseded by a few different libraries. The stuff I used most often were the functional tools and Moses (https://github.com/Yonaba/Moses/ https://github.com/Yonaba/Moses/) blows the doors off of PL in that regard.
  - justinmk 12y ago
    Have you looked at luafun? If so, what's your opinion? https://github.com/rtsisyk/luafun https://github.com/rtsisyk/luafun
LewisJEllis 12y ago
Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list is to provide an overview of what's out there. As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be reconsidered.
- walterbell 12y ago
  > Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community Is that for technical reasons or because Lua is commonly used in proprietary apps?
  - LewisJEllis 12y ago
    Not necessarily proprietary apps, but a wide variety of use cases; Lua is embedded in all kinds of different stuff and used for game dev, webdev, embedded scripting, WoW, configuration, and much more, whereas JS, for example, is used in just two main (related) cases. This makes Lua's userbase rather fragmented across these niches.
  - castell 12y ago
    The Lua language and LuaJIT are great. The user base is fragmented (version 4, 5.1 (LuaJIT) vs 5.2), as Lua is usually used as embedded language (alongside C, C++, ...) for video games (World of Warcraft, Far Cry, ...), applications (Adobe Lightroom, ...), etc. And the http://lua.org http://lua.org website is a bit too minimalistic to offer community features. The project only hosts a mailing list and a old-school wiki. The additional libraries are/were hosted on http://luaforge.net http://luaforge.net , an outdated sourceforge clone. The documentation is static and the development process itself is not so open. The Lua language standard library is lacking functions almost every other language ship with their default package (so everyone has to either find & download additional libraries or reinvent the wheel). Other languages like PHP have a documentation that allows the community to add comments and code samples.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      If someone created a community site with editable docs, do you think it would gain traction?
dayveec 12y ago
Why do you say that? WRT doco it's one of the better Lua libraries.
catwell 12y ago
I disagree strongly with that. Penlight is the closest thing there is to a Lua standard library (loosely modeled after what exists in Python). It is maintained by Steve Donovan who is one of the most active members of the community and the author of http://www.luafaq.org/ http://www.luafaq.org/, LDoc and lake. Having contributed to Penlight myself I can say it is certainly not poorly maintained compared to most other Lua projects. I agree, Penlight is not the best at everything it does, and it probably does too much (which is why there is microlight), but it is still a tool most Lua users need to know about.

spb 12y ago

"awesome-lua" is probably not a good choice of name as the most common association of "awesome" with "Lua" is the Lua-based Awesome window manager.

LewisJEllis 12y ago
This is a totally valid point which I considered, but I think the association of awesome-<language> for lists like this is more valuable, since part of the purpose is to make it accessible for people outside the lua world (who probably won't know about awesomeWM anyway).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Sander_Marechal 12y ago
  But you make life a lot more difficult for people who do use the Awesome Window Manager, because it becomes much harder for us to find solutions to problems using Google for instance.
  - klibertp 12y ago
    Just add "wm" to your queries...
  - LewisJEllis 12y ago
    'awesome-lua' is not typically a phrase/term referring to the Awesome WM. On GitHub, there is only one awesome-wm-related repo by the name `awesome-lua`; it's just one person's configuration and hasn't been updated since 2012. I don't think I'm stepping on anybody's toes here. Typically, the window manager is referred to as either just 'awesome' or as 'awesome wm'. awesome-lua is not a name conflict with 'awesome' or with 'awesome wm', and the worst case for search results is that awesome-lua shows up and bumps everything else down by one spot. As klibertp suggested, adding 'wm' to your query makes awesome-lua not show up at all; claiming that I 'make life a lot more difficult' is rather silly.
12y ago

sheetjs 12y ago

There is another awesome-lua list that predates this one: https://github.com/forhappy/awesome-lua https://github.com/forhappy/awesome-lua The "master list": https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

LewisJEllis 12y ago
Indeed; I have no claim to originality. The pre-existing list is (extremely) incomplete, and gives a laundry list of outdated and unmaintained libraries which are often not useful or broadly relevant. Such entries dilute the usefulness of all other entries on the list, so I made this version to avoid that (and to be more complete).

degio 12y ago

I wish I had this list when I started programming in Lua.

walterbell 12y ago

Why isn't a search engine sufficient for discovering <foo-language> packages and resources? Historically, human-edited lists don't have a long archival lifetime, e.g. original Yahoo, DMOZ, Mahalo. If curation is better than search, why is a curated list better hosted at github than Wikipedia, which has a lower technical cost of editing? If the problem is Wikipedia moderation, who will reconcile multiple github curated lists? Is the expectation that github's "awesome-xyz" repos will rank higher in Google search results than a curated Wikipedia page? Or is this github-specific SEO?

pinkyand 12y ago
Maybe the way to judge curation is by comparing curation+search to search alone. With good curation effort, i think that curation+search is a winner , at a relatively minor cost(needing more time). Also curation has the benefit of being a useful discovery tool.
- walterbell 12y ago
  In theory, https://www.openhub.net/p?r&q=lua https://www.openhub.net/p?r&q=lua could construct/curate such lists from project activity analytics.
  - pinkyand 12y ago
    Personally i think human curation is much better than curation by activity analytics, and it can offer better context.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      No question. But it usually doesn't last, as people move onto other projects. Even within this thread, the new list is replacing a similarly named, now unmaintained list. DMOZ/Wikipedia at least try to provide long-term continuity and a standardized ontology for discovery. This github list is depending on the searcher already knowing that they should preface their dev discovery queries with "awesome". If this list format were standardized, it could be dynamically merged with data from OpenHub. Or GitHub could add analytics features (similar to OpenHub) to assist the human curator editing this GitHub repo.

luastoned 12y ago

Another site that has a nice overview is http://luapower.com http://luapower.com

alok-g 12y ago

Can someone please recommend a library for music synthesis?

justincormack 12y ago
The only thing I came across (not my area) was this http://worp.zevv.nl/ http://worp.zevv.nl/

J_Darnley 12y ago

Your list of section anchor links appears to be broken. I click on any and nothing happens. Otherwise I look forward to browsing it.

LewisJEllis 12y ago
Hm, they work fine for me; can you be more specific?
- J_Darnley 12y ago
  How can I be more specific than "I click on any and nothing happens"? The links must point to non-existent anchors in the page. I'll go have a quick look at the source but I don't know what it can tell me.

castell 12y ago

Some more packages are on the LuaForge list: http://luaforge.net/projects/ http://luaforge.net/projects/ (though LuaForge looks outdated) Thanks for curating the list!

seri 12y ago

Does anybody know a stable Lua package for HTML scraping, preferrably similar to Nokogiri or Beautiful Soup?