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Having just gone through the exercise of integrating Lua with a custom game engine over the past few weeks, I have to echo how clean the integration with other
by opticfluorine 2y ago
Having just gone through the exercise of integrating Lua with a custom game engine over the past few weeks, I have to echo how clean the integration with other languages is.
It's also worth noting that the interface is clean in such a way that it is straightforward to automatically generate bindings. In my case, I used a handful of Roslyn Incremental Source Generators to automatically generate bindings between C# and Lua that matched my overall architecture. It was not at all difficult because of the way the interface is designed. The Lua stack together with its dynamic typing and "tables" made it very easy to generate marshallers for arbitrary data classes between C# and Lua.
That said, there are plenty of valid criticisms of the language itself (sorry, not to nitpick, but I am really not a fan of one-based indexing). I'm thinking about designing an embedded scripting language that addresses some of these issues while having a similar interface for integration... Would make for a fun side project one of these days.
- zogomoox 2y agoif you fix the one based indexing you should call yours KT@ or Kt`
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago> sorry, not to nitpick, but I am really not a fan of one-based indexing It is very funny how this is just the one sole criticism that always gets brought up. Not that other problems don't exist, but they're not very talked about. Lua's strength as a language is that it does a lot quite well in ways that aren't noticeable. But when you compare things to the competition then they're quite obvious. E.g. Type Coercion. Complete shitshow in lots of languages. Nightmare in Javascript. In Lua? It's quite elegant but most interestingly, effortlessly elegant. Very little of the rest of the language had to change to accomodate the improvement. (Excercise for the reader: Spot the one change that completely fixes string<->number conversion) Makes Brendan Eich look like a total clown in comparison.
- PicassoCTs 2y agoOne based indexing is also the one thing every beginners course has to hammer into people, as its so non-intuitive until you know about pointers.
- taberiand 2y agoTo be fair, having to work with 1 based indexing when you're used to 0 would be a frustrating source of off-by-one errors and extra cognitive load
- opticfluorine 2y agoEspecially when one of the language's main purposes is to be embedded in applications written in other languages (which are predominantly zero based) - and so you tend to have a lot of back-and-forth integration between these two styles that can get confusing. Even from the C API side, for example, the Lua stack is one-based but addressed exclusively from the host language which is likely zero-based.
- berkut 2y agoAs someone who's used Lua a lot as an embedded language in the VFX industry (The Games industry wasn't the only one that used it for that!), and had to deal with wrapping C++ and Python APIs with Lua (and vice-versa at times!), this is indeed very annoying, especially when tracing through callstacks to work out what's going on. Eventually you end up in a place where it's beneficial to have converter functions that show up in the call stack frames so that you can keep track of whether the index is in the right "coordinate index system" (for lack of a better term) for the right language.
- fp64 2y agoOh that’s super interesting, where in the VFX industry is Lua common? I typically deal with Python and maybe Tcl (I do mostly Nuke and pipeline integrations), and I can’t think of a tool that is scripted in Lua. But I’ve never worked with Vega or Shake or what this is/was called
- berkut 2y agoKatana uses LuaJIT quite extensively for user-side OpScripts, and previously both DNeg and MPC (they've largely moved on to newer tech now) had quite a lot of Lua code...
- opticfluorine 2y agoIt is funny, isn't it? I always wonder how the language would be perceived had they gone with zero based indexing from the start. I'm a big fan of Lua, including for the reasons you mention. I suspect the reason this one thing is always brought up is twofold: it's easy to notice, and it's very rare these days outside of Lua (if you consider VB.NET to be a legacy language, anyway). Other criticisms take more effort to communicate, and you can throw a rock and hit ten other languages with the same or similar issues.
- sitkack 2y agoDon't forget that not equals is ~=, the horror. The real gripes should be globals by default and ... nothing. Lua is wonderful.
- gerdesj 2y ago"Don't forget that not equals is ~=, the horror." I get you are taking the piss but ~= is just as logical as != being the symbols for: "not equals", if you've been exposed to some math(s) as well as ... well, ! means factorial, doesn't it? Syntax is syntax and so is vocabulary! In the end you copy and paste off of Stack Exchange and all is golden 8)
- ctippett 2y agoI'm more familiar with CSS than I am with Lua. The syntax for the former has a very different meaning[1]. [attr~=value] Represents elements with an attribute name of attr whose value is a whitespace-separated list of words, one of which is exactly value. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_selectors#attrvalue_2 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_s...
- bingo3131 2y ago! is commonly used as the unary not operator, so "a != b" makes sense as a shortcut for "!(a == b)". a not equals b.
- xigoi 2y agoBut in Lua, the unary not is written as “not”.
- astrobe_ 2y agoFor a language apparently inspired from Wirth, one would have expected <> (greater-or-lesser-than). But the real horror, to me, is Windows not letting one disable the so~called "dead keys" easily.
- kps 2y ago
- saghm 2y agoHonestly, it might almost act as a "honeypot" to give people a convenient target to complain about, which makes it easier for the rest of the language to get viewed as a whole rather than nitpicked. Sometimes I think people like to have at least one negative thing to say about something new they learn, whether it's to show that they understand enough to be able to find something or it's to be "cool" enough not to just like everything.
- chii 2y agothat would be a galaxy brain move on the part of lua.
- saghm 2y agoTo be clear, I'm not claiming that I think this was the original intent for implementing array indexes like this; I'm just theorizing that this might explain why this ends up being such a fixation when it comes to discusses downsides of Lua.
- krapp 2y ago>Makes Brendan Eich look like a total clown in comparison. To be fair, Brendan Eich was making a scripting language for the 90's web. It isn't his fault Silicon Valley decided that language needed to become the Ur-language to replace all application development in the future.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoWasn't the language he was making for the web Scheme?
- hollerith 2y agoNo, Scheme was defined in 1975.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoSo? That doesn't stop Brendan Eich from putting it in a web browser 20 years later.
- hollerith 2y agoNo, it does not. I see I misunderstood your q.
- yoz 2y agoMost of the blame should go to Netscape management. They didn't give Eich much time, then burst in before he was done and made him copy a bunch of things from Java. (The new language, codenamed "Mocha" internally, was first publicly announced as "LiveScript", and then Sun threw a bunch of money at Netscape.) IIRC, Eich was quite influenced by Python's design. I wish he'd just used Lua - would likely have saved a lot of pain. (Although, all that said, I have no idea what Lua looked like in 1994, and how much of its design has changed since then.)
- BrendanEich 2y ago
- m463 2y ago> I'm thinking about designing an embedded scripting language that addresses some of these issues... https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ ;)