Penlight VS Lua

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

The EventSource uses the Lua language to search for any services with ports set to 80 or 443 in the ‘argocd’ namespace. More examples can be found here.

If you're new to the 12 in 24 series, I'm learning and building projects with a new programming language every month - this month, it's the Lua scripting language. You can find source code for the projects I build in the official GitHub repository (check it out, this week's folder contains code for both this and two other bonus projects!).

This month, we're talking about Lua. It's not always a first choice when it comes to programming, but I think there's a lot to enjoy about this little language. Heck, I'm a big game development fan myself - I would look into it even if that was the only reason to.

It’s Portuguese. It’s the same in the Lua codebase [1].

[1]: https://github.com/lua/lua

If we think we need more flexibility for processing records, we can write our own embedded filters using Lua language. Lua is a highly efficient programming language used mainly for embedded scripting.

Lua

➜ ~ brew info lua ==> lua: stable 5.4.6 (bottled) Powerful, lightweight programming language https://www.lua.org/ /opt/homebrew/Cellar/lua/5.4.6 (29 files, 788.7KB) * Poured from bottle using the formulae.brew.sh API on 2023-05-16 at 11:03:06 From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/l/lua.rb License: MIT ==> Caveats You may also want luarocks: brew install luarocks ==> Analytics install: 16,599 (30 days), 56,745 (90 days), 139,027 (365 days) install-on-request: 1,763 (30 days), 6,266 (90 days), 21,105 (365 days) build-error: 0 (30 days)

I think Lua is a good example of doing documentation well. The source code is commented only as much as needed, mainly with brief comments about things that might not be obvious and a small number of longer explanations of how the architecture works (mainly relevant to developers). It also has a super nice feature that's surprisingly rare: each file has a very short line at the top that describes what the file is, so you don't have to guess based on the filename alone. The API is documented in a single HTML file on the website that has both the high level descriptions of the language and architecture, as well as documentation for each public-facing function. The docs are maintained by hand, but the API is mostly stable, so the docs don't need to change very often.

This is using the Lua language and the Solar2d game framework