[Ffmpeg-devel] SVN dump

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 04:17:00PM -0400, Dave Dodge wrote:
> Yes, whenever I've gone poking around in the Lua source I've found it
> to be very easy to read; the fact that it's got size and portability
> as design goals probably helps quite a bit.  Also, the interface
> between Lua and C (when using one language to call the other) is a
> thing of beauty.

Indeed it is!

> A downside (or upside, depending on your point of view) to Lua is that

Upside! :)

> it doesn't have the extensive bundled libraries of things like Python,
> Perl, Ruby, etc.  You can get such libraries, or roll your own, but
> they aren't standardized.

The presence of large numbers of unportable, poorly implemented,
hackish, broken-in-corner-cases libraries that everyone counts on
having is one of the main things that distinguishes a RAD tool from a
real language. :)

So yes, what I like most about Lua is that it has no standard
primitives for things which are host/environment-specific, only actual
computation. Then when you write an application using Lua, you provide
the primitives you want the Lua code to have at its disposal. Security
is trivial because it's capable of doing nothing by default.
Portability is also excellent because you write a calling C program
that explicitly links the C code you need rather than relying on
nonportable dll-loading hacks like many languages use for FFI.

> I've written a couple of small Lisp interpreters over the years, as
> part of larger applications (to do processing that needed to be
> extensible, or was simply more easily expressed in functional terms).
> These days I'd probably just use Lua instead.

Hmm.... imagine an Emacs with Lua as its embedded language... :) :) :)

Rich