Re: [9front] lua9: lua interpreter with plan9 bindings

[telephil9@gmail.com]

> On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:41:38 +0100
> telephil9@gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> > On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 9:20 AM <telephil9@gmail.com> wrote:  
>> >>
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> Building on the lua port by staalmannen
>> >> (http://github.com/staalmannen/lua), I wrote a custom version of
>> >> the lua interpreter including bindings to some plan9 libraries. I
>> >> feel that lua is a simple (and good enough) scripting language
>> >> which makes writing GUI code more convenient than in C. For the
>> >> time being, this includes bindings for libdraw but I plan to
>> >> extend this to other plan9 libraries in the future (libplumb for
>> >> instance). 
>> > 
>> > Nice work!
>> > I imagine you wrote a custom interpreter because Plan 9 does not
>> > have a well established dynamic library mechanism. Do you plan on
>> > embedding everything into the interpreter?  
>> 
>> Thanks.
>> Yes, the lack of dynamic library loading gives no other choice than
>> embedding everything in the interpreter. This is the reason why I
>> wrote this instead of lua modules as you would find on other
>> platforms.
>> 
> 
> Do you plan on porting it from APE to native Plan 9 libaries?
> That would allow native code to link to liblua.a.
> 
> I have a WIP port that does that, but I have other projects that need
> my attention more.
> 
> Personally, I'd love to use Lua instead of Acid's rather limited
> scripting language, that's my biggest motivation for writing the port.

That was not the initial plan but I have been thinking about it lately as it would
also give access to more libraries (main interest would be 9p).
I might give this a shot in the upcoming weeks.