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The qualms I have with this dialogue are the same as before, because CloudFlare has little to no idea how they are going to handle this. JGC tweeted me about ho

The qualms I have with this dialogue are the same as before, because CloudFlare has little to no idea how they are going to handle this. JGC tweeted me about how 'Oh, we get so much benefit from LuaJIT being FOSS" but here we have CloudFlare walling LuaJIT into it's own entity on GitHub where I predict commit bits will be few and far between. More than that, I don't think there has been enough narrative between Mike and the 'new LuaJIT crew' (CF) to determine how the project should be structured. In this thread, agentzh had a fantastic idea to vet somebody through Mike, someone the community knows can be trusted and also is somewhat familiar with the LuaJIT internals, and that person could serve as a canary between the project and CF. I write a fair bit of Lua for game scripting, and I've even made a few bucks here and there helping folks with their custom plugin ideas etc, but I've never touched C before. Well, when the previous announcement was made, I immediately Amazon'd some C books, which I plan to devour in my free time. At which point I'll be learning Rust, and reimplementing LuaJIT in Rust, and hopefully convince Mozilla to host the git, such that it will be protected from FOSS corruption. My worst fear is CF taking this project into the shadows, developing it closed-source (which they absolutely have a right to do) and not sharing their insights with the community. I think everybody with any kind of invested interest in LuaJIT needs to be gearing up right now, such that we can do our parts to keep this project alive.

jgrahamc 11y ago
JGC tweeted me about how 'Oh, we get so much benefit from LuaJIT being FOSS" And we do. We paid Mike Pall to work on open source LuaJIT, we've contributed to NGINX, hired people to exclusively work on open source projects. Here's the harsh economic reality: it is simply better business for us to spend a relatively small amount of money on open source support to get what we need from fantastic projects like LuaJIT than to try to develop this stuff ourselves. My worst fear is CF taking this project into the shadows, developing it closed-source (which they absolutely have a right to do) and not sharing their insights with the community. How do we "have the right to do" that? Whatever makes you think us trying to closed source this would have any benefit to us? How is the Github account (of which Mike Pall is an owner) us walling it off? More than that, I don't think there has been enough narrative between Mike and the 'new LuaJIT crew' (CF) to determine how the project should be structured. I predict that if I hadn't sent an email to the list soliciting ideas and input and had announced a new structure you would have complained that everything had been done in the shadows.
- logicrime 11y ago
  Everything IS being done in the shadows!! All you've done is write a few paragraphs about how great the community is, and make a repo. CF's work on nginx is of no concern to me, and even less so is the tendency of CF to hire people to work FOSS projects. Big deal. Nobody that's reading this is stupid enough to believe that it's out of the realm of possibility to spend some money on your image. What you've said about LuaJIT all but confirms my suspicions that CF will suck the project dry for efficiency until it's a dry withered husk. You are shoehorning developers at CF into LuaJIT the same way that Google shoehorns developers into the Chromium project. What ultimately happens is the work that gets done in Chromium ends up being misused in Chrome as a commercial bloat whose function is to extract and extrapolate as much as it can about the user. The user's intention is just to browse the web smoothly, and they get taken for a ride. LuaJIT is meant to be a performance implementation of Lua, suitable for embedding within larger applications and games as a DSL. At this point in time, I would absolutely stand behind the argument that CF seeks to turn LuaJIT into a more standalone project that leverages CF's infrastructure to make CF even more money. I just can't abide, and I certainly can't believe that you expect the community to watch this happen as you systematically corporatize a well-loved, well-used, well-done project.
  - redxdev 11y ago
    Where is the proof that CF is doing anything remotely like what you say? All they've done is create a Github repo (which is many developers preferred platform) and say that they are moving to a more distributed governance model. All at the request of the original maintainer, Mike Pall. They've even explicitly stated that CF will not be taking over the project; they're only helping move it to a new home and to find a group who can maintain it to replace Mike Pall. There's zero evidence that CF's intentions are to the contrary, so I do think what you are saying is completely unfounded. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      [Responding here to the parent flagged comment] While logicrime's comments may be wrong and a bit over the top, I don't think this comment should have been flagged. We've seen a well-explained criticism of a potential, if unlikely, future. These comments are much less inflammatory than other comments that have been left alone on HN. I still plan on embedding LuaJIT into my automation software, so I personally look forward to to seeing what CF and any LuaJIT successors produce. So let's take logicrime's fears into consideration instead of just shutting them down. Thanks for looking after LuaJIT, jgc and CF!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  I think you're mistaking humility and open-mindedness for incompetence. Exactly.
  - pierrec 11y ago
    Uh sorry, not sure why I deleted that. (Guess I felt this might turn into a warzone and decided to avoid feeding it.)
    - dang 11y ago
      Users with this level of concern for HN's quality are the reason why the site survives as well as it does. Thank you.
  - logicrime 11y ago
    I'm not accusing anyone of incompetence. Only a fool would make the implication that you aren't a knowledgeable programmer. I'm accusing CF (not you specifically) of making the first moves to morph LuaJIT into a corporate tool.
thoughtpolice 11y ago
> Well, when the previous announcement was made, I immediately Amazon'd some C books, which I plan to devour in my free time. At which point I'll be learning Rust, and reimplementing LuaJIT in Rust, and hopefully convince Mozilla to host the git, such that it will be protected from FOSS corruption. See you in 15 years.
- logicrime 11y ago
  Vanilla Lua is ~25k of C these days. That's what I'm going to dive into first. I've worked on bigger projects LOC-wise.
  - thoughtpolice 11y ago
    The point isn't the LOC. If you've never even touched C, you're not just going to have to learn that, you're going to have to learn how to write an optimizing compiler (because frankly if you've never touched C I'm skeptical you have any experience in this). And not just that: you're going to have to learn how to write the world's most optimizing trace-based JIT compiler for a dynamic programming language. Mike spent 10 years designing LuaJIT and it is in a league of its own, not paralleled by anything else. Do not expect this inane project of yours to be solved by looking at 25,000 lines of C code. Especially if, point of fact, you do not even know C. Expect it to be 'solved' after a decade of research and hard work at minimum. I'm not sure what paranoid reality you live in where you think this is feasible, or even desireable given your original post (frankly even though a port isn't needed Rust would be an awful choice for a 'port' due to the fact it's simply not got as good availability, the compilers and tools are less mature), but when I said see you in 15 years, it wasn't a joke - it was a conservative estimate.

jgrahamc 11y ago

JGC tweeted me about how 'Oh, we get so much benefit from LuaJIT being FOSS" And we do. We paid Mike Pall to work on open source LuaJIT, we've contributed to NGINX, hired people to exclusively work on open source projects. Here's the harsh economic reality: it is simply better business for us to spend a relatively small amount of money on open source support to get what we need from fantastic projects like LuaJIT than to try to develop this stuff ourselves. My worst fear is CF taking this project into the shadows, developing it closed-source (which they absolutely have a right to do) and not sharing their insights with the community. How do we "have the right to do" that? Whatever makes you think us trying to closed source this would have any benefit to us? How is the Github account (of which Mike Pall is an owner) us walling it off? More than that, I don't think there has been enough narrative between Mike and the 'new LuaJIT crew' (CF) to determine how the project should be structured. I predict that if I hadn't sent an email to the list soliciting ideas and input and had announced a new structure you would have complained that everything had been done in the shadows.

logicrime 11y ago
Everything IS being done in the shadows!! All you've done is write a few paragraphs about how great the community is, and make a repo. CF's work on nginx is of no concern to me, and even less so is the tendency of CF to hire people to work FOSS projects. Big deal. Nobody that's reading this is stupid enough to believe that it's out of the realm of possibility to spend some money on your image. What you've said about LuaJIT all but confirms my suspicions that CF will suck the project dry for efficiency until it's a dry withered husk. You are shoehorning developers at CF into LuaJIT the same way that Google shoehorns developers into the Chromium project. What ultimately happens is the work that gets done in Chromium ends up being misused in Chrome as a commercial bloat whose function is to extract and extrapolate as much as it can about the user. The user's intention is just to browse the web smoothly, and they get taken for a ride. LuaJIT is meant to be a performance implementation of Lua, suitable for embedding within larger applications and games as a DSL. At this point in time, I would absolutely stand behind the argument that CF seeks to turn LuaJIT into a more standalone project that leverages CF's infrastructure to make CF even more money. I just can't abide, and I certainly can't believe that you expect the community to watch this happen as you systematically corporatize a well-loved, well-used, well-done project.
- redxdev 11y ago
  Where is the proof that CF is doing anything remotely like what you say? All they've done is create a Github repo (which is many developers preferred platform) and say that they are moving to a more distributed governance model. All at the request of the original maintainer, Mike Pall. They've even explicitly stated that CF will not be taking over the project; they're only helping move it to a new home and to find a group who can maintain it to replace Mike Pall. There's zero evidence that CF's intentions are to the contrary, so I do think what you are saying is completely unfounded. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    [Responding here to the parent flagged comment] While logicrime's comments may be wrong and a bit over the top, I don't think this comment should have been flagged. We've seen a well-explained criticism of a potential, if unlikely, future. These comments are much less inflammatory than other comments that have been left alone on HN. I still plan on embedding LuaJIT into my automation software, so I personally look forward to to seeing what CF and any LuaJIT successors produce. So let's take logicrime's fears into consideration instead of just shutting them down. Thanks for looking after LuaJIT, jgc and CF!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jgrahamc 11y ago
I think you're mistaking humility and open-mindedness for incompetence. Exactly.
- pierrec 11y ago
  Uh sorry, not sure why I deleted that. (Guess I felt this might turn into a warzone and decided to avoid feeding it.)
  - dang 11y ago
    Users with this level of concern for HN's quality are the reason why the site survives as well as it does. Thank you.
- logicrime 11y ago
  I'm not accusing anyone of incompetence. Only a fool would make the implication that you aren't a knowledgeable programmer. I'm accusing CF (not you specifically) of making the first moves to morph LuaJIT into a corporate tool.

thoughtpolice 11y ago

> Well, when the previous announcement was made, I immediately Amazon'd some C books, which I plan to devour in my free time. At which point I'll be learning Rust, and reimplementing LuaJIT in Rust, and hopefully convince Mozilla to host the git, such that it will be protected from FOSS corruption. See you in 15 years.

logicrime 11y ago
Vanilla Lua is ~25k of C these days. That's what I'm going to dive into first. I've worked on bigger projects LOC-wise.
- thoughtpolice 11y ago
  The point isn't the LOC. If you've never even touched C, you're not just going to have to learn that, you're going to have to learn how to write an optimizing compiler (because frankly if you've never touched C I'm skeptical you have any experience in this). And not just that: you're going to have to learn how to write the world's most optimizing trace-based JIT compiler for a dynamic programming language. Mike spent 10 years designing LuaJIT and it is in a league of its own, not paralleled by anything else. Do not expect this inane project of yours to be solved by looking at 25,000 lines of C code. Especially if, point of fact, you do not even know C. Expect it to be 'solved' after a decade of research and hard work at minimum. I'm not sure what paranoid reality you live in where you think this is feasible, or even desireable given your original post (frankly even though a port isn't needed Rust would be an awful choice for a 'port' due to the fact it's simply not got as good availability, the compilers and tools are less mature), but when I said see you in 15 years, it wasn't a joke - it was a conservative estimate.