Comment by opticfluorine
1 year 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.
> 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.
To 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
As 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.
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It absolutely is. For a language whose biggest selling factor is embeddability with C/C++, that decision (and I'm being polite) is a headscratcher (along with the other similar source of errors: 0 evaluating to true).
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I don't really blame Lua for that, though. 1-based indexing comes naturally to humans. It's the other languages which are backwards. I get why other languages are backwards from human intuition, I do. But if something has to be declared the bad guy, imo it's the paradigm which is at odds with human intuition which deserves that label, not the paradigm which fits us well.
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Especially 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.
Don't forget that not equals is ~=, the horror.
The real gripes should be globals by default and ... nothing. Lua is wonderful.
"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)
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It's _ENV by default, it just defaults to _G.
Yeah, 36 years of Unicode and it's still not ‘≠’.
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It 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.
>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.
Most 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.)
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> It isn't his fault Silicon Valley decided that language needed to become the Ur-language to replace all application development in the future.
Which remains one of the most baffling decisions of all time, even to this day. Javascript is unpleasant to work with in the browser, the place it was designed for. It is utterly beyond me why anyone would go out of their way to use it in contexts where there are countless better languages available for the job. At least in the browser you pretty much have to use JS, so there's a good reason to tolerate it. Not so outside of the browser.
Wasn't the language he was making for the web Scheme?
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> To be fair, Brendan Eich was making a scripting language for the 90's web.
He was, and he doesn't deserve the full blame for being bad at designing a language when that wasn't his prior job or field of specialization.
But Lua is older so there's this element of "it didn't need to be this bad, he just fucked up" (And Eich being a jerk makes it amusing to pour some salt on that wound. Everyone understands it's not entirely serious.)
"Silicon Valley" is not an actor (human or organization of humans) that decided any such thing. This is like saying a virus decides to infect a host. JS got on first, and that meant it stuck. After getting on first, switching costs and sunk costs (fallacy or not) kept it going.
The pressure to evolve JS in a more fair-play standards setting rose and fell as browser competition rose and fell, because browser vendors compete for developers as lead users and promoters. Before competition came back, a leading or upstart browser could and did innovate ahead of the last JS standard. IE did this with DHTML mostly outside the core language, which MS helped standardize at the same time. I did it in Mozilla's engine in the late '90s, implementing things that made it into ES3, ES5, and ES6 (Array extras, getters and setters, more).
But the evolutionary regime everyone operated in didn't "decide" anything. There was and is no "Silicon Valley" entity calling such shots.
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I don't think JavaScript will replace all application development in the future. WebAssembly will displace JavaScript. With WebAssembly you can use whatever language you like and achieve higher performance than JavaScript.
One 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.
Honestly, 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.
that would be a galaxy brain move on the part of lua.
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if you fix the one based indexing you should call yours KT@ or Kt`
> I'm thinking about designing an embedded scripting language that addresses some of these issues...
https://xkcd.com/927/
;)