Penlight VS Fennel

To have enough batteries you kind of just need penlight[1] and maybe luastd. Of course there's posix, lfs, socket, luasec and you're semi set.

[1]: https://lunarmodules.github.io/Penlight/

https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight provides a bunch of functionality for stuff like that.

However, there's already a widely known, well-tested library in the lua community called penlight that covers a lot of lua's "missing" functionality. It's got sane string manipulation, ergonomic tables, a basic class mechanism, functional programming, enums, exceptions, path manipulation, etc...

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries and lume are focused on gamedev; Penlight aims at bringing the breadth of python's stdlib to lua; plenary.nvim for nvim plugins; and probably more for other domains. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back because I found some implementations confusing/overcomplicated/inconsistent).

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. This was one of my initial roadblocks. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries, Penlight, or the aforementioned lume. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back).

As for batteries, there's things like penlight which comes with a huge set of pure Lua libraries inspired by Python. And, well, there's Fennel libraries with macros and more lispy style APIs.

I'm very surprised there was no mention of Penlight in that article. Penlight, a supplemental standard library for Lua that is heavily inspired by Python's own standard library, has been around for years now:

https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight

It's interesting: minimal software is out there, but folks don't tend to choose it. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to be conservative in my dependencies, and this encourages a lightweight stack that tends to perform pretty well. These days, I'm favoring tools like Lua, SQLite, Fennel[0], Althttpd[1], Fossil[2], and the Mako Server[3] and find that great, lightweight, stable, efficient software is to be had, for free, but you have to go a bit off the beaten path. This isn't stuff you hear about on Stack Overflow.

In terms of frontend, which the post focuses on (Google Docs and a 30MB doc), I guess I'm conflicted. While I tend to favor native apps + web pages, I'm also a daily Tiddlywiki user, and I really think web apps have their place (heck, one idea I'm working on is a lightweight local server that lets you run web apps like Tiddlywiki). But without a doubt, Tiddlywiki is more resource intensive than Emacs (my go-to for notetaking when I'm not on TW). My tab for a 6MB Tiddlywiki file uses 155MB of RAM, and my (heavily customized, dozens of open buffers) Emacs session uses 88MB. So I do think the author has a good point.

[0]: https://fennel-lang.org/

Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

https://fennel-lang.org

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

* https://fennel-lang.org/

I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.

If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.