Re: Interpreted language(s) in the base

2010/8/16 Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des_at_des.no>:
> Doug Barton <dougb_at_FreeBSD.org> writes:
>> lua   too "flavor of the day," not enough track record of stability,
>>       not enough installed base/proven utility
>
> You're wrong.  Lua has been around for ages and is especially widely
> used as a game scripting engine.  It is not intended as a standalone
> language, but as an embeddable scripting engine.  We could easily create
> our own scripting language based on lua with FreeBSD-specific functions,
> and there would be no fear of interfering with third-party software,
> because it wouldn't be called lua.

Replying randomly to this post but also to phk's, dougb's and others'
points specifically about lua:

1. "churn" / version stability / "language of the day"

History of lua's recent releases is:
- 5.2 : TBD, new yet unfinished release, "will be done when it is done"
- 5.1 : 2006.
- 5.0 : 2003.
- 4.0 : 2000.
...
- 1.0 : 1993.

[source: http://www.lua.org/versions.html]

If anything, it's much slower than the "hip" languages.

2. Future compatibility / ports dependancies, etc.

If anything gets imported, lua or something else, I will loudly
support renaming it to something like "bsdscript", binaries and
libraries and all.

3. Size of language

Lua *is* 32 C files (and as many C headers) in a single directory,
totalling (with headers) a bit over 17,000 lines. The interpreter can
be compiled with "gcc -o bsdscript *.c". Libraries can be built
similarly.

There are no other libraries or modules which "make" lua, Among the
mentioned above are equivalents of stdio, libm, libz, etc.

4. Embeddability

Here's the documentation: http://www.lua.org/pil/24.1.html

Personally, I'm more interested in the opposite direction: writing
FreeBSD-specific lua libraries (which would wrap, as an obvious
example coming from me, libgeom) making it possible to script complex
system scripts in lua.

5. License

Released under MIT license: http://www.lua.org/license.html