Penlight
A set of pure Lua libraries focusing on input data handling (such as reading configuration files), functional programming (such as map, reduce, placeholder expressions,etc), and OS path management. Much of the functionality is inspired by the Python standard libraries. (by lunarmodules)
luaforwindows
Lua for Windows is a 'batteries included environment' for the Lua scripting language on Windows. NOTICE: Looking for maintainer. (by rjpcomputing)
| Penlight | luaforwindows | |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | 6 | |
| 1,823 | 2,753 | |
| 0.9% | - | |
| 6.6 | 0.0 | |
| 16 days ago | 10 months ago | |
| Lua | HTML | |
| MIT License | - |
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Penlight
Posts with mentions or reviews of Penlight.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-27.
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Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
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/
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I love that Lua can access file so simply using io.open, can Lua be used to delete, copy and paste folders?
https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight provides a bunch of functionality for stuff like that.
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[discussion] Why don't more (any?) plugin authors use penlight?
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...
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What would be the significant benefits if one would develop equivalent libraries that are available for Python for Lua/Nelua?
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).
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Thoughts on LUA?
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).
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Trying Fennel for GTK apps and it's surprisingly good
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.
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Lua's Lack of “Batteries”
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
luaforwindows
Posts with mentions or reviews of luaforwindows.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-01-15.
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More of a Windows question, probably, but: How to run Lua from Git Bash/Zsh in Windows?
However, after installing the package Lua For Windows, that apparently installs the tools in the infamous WindowsApps folder, I can't run lua from the zsh terminal, getting this error:
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How do I install Lua exactly? Because I can't run lua files in bash
If you're trying to install for Windows, https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows
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It's never been easier to get Lua! Just type < winget install "lua for windows" > into terminal and you're done! (No <> in the terminal) Tell your friends!
Earlier, I submitted Lua For Windows to the Winget repository.
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How Do I Edit the UI of an App That Uses IUP?
I had to resort to going here: https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows/releases to get Lua bundled with a bunch of libraries, including IUP. It's out-of-date (Lua 5.1), but that's what CityBinder was made with anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter? It comes with SciTE to edit with.
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Windows: 'unexpected symbol' errors upon running any script
I had a Windows installation of 'luaForWindows' that, for some reason stopped working. It stopped working in the following way. I could load a lua interpreter, but each time I ran a lua script I got an error about unexpected symbol near ' '. (What a helpful message!) Previously I had uninstalled some Visual C libraries. Reinstalling the libraries, and indeed reinstalling luaForWindows, did not help. I discovered that luaForWindows looked unmaintained so I got lua binaries (in the x64 version) from SourceForge, marvelled at the lack there - or almost anywhere - of instructions, and did the following.
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Lua's Lack of “Batteries”
Having a set of "blessed" libraries has definitely been discussed on the mailing list. Also there are plenty of "distributions" like Lua for Windows[1], LuaPower[2], or runtimes like Luvit[3] that add features ootb.
That said - the Lua ecosystem in 2021 is not the same as it was in 2005 or whenever people compare it to. There is a healthy amount of Libraries and choices of libraries for solving most tasks on Luarocks. And I would suggest you produce a better end project by selecting which libraries are included in your project that uses Lua for scripting. You can even further remove your choice of the libraries that _are_ included ootb.
[1] - https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows
[2] - https://luapower.com/
[3] - http://luvit.io/
What are some alternatives?
When comparing Penlight and luaforwindows you can also consider the following projects:
luafun - Lua Fun is a high-performance functional programming library for Lua designed with LuaJIT's trace compiler in mind.
tl - The compiler for Teal, a typed dialect of Lua
Vermintide-2-Source-Code - Decompiled scripts from Warhammer: Vermintide 2.
gravity - Gravity Programming Language
lua-vips - Lua binding for the libvips image processing library
pallene - Pallene Compiler
luakit - Fast, small, webkit based browser framework extensible by Lua.
heart - A high performance Lua web server with a simple, powerful API
sqlite.lua - SQLite LuaJIT binding with a very simple api.
inspect.lua - Human-readable representation of Lua tables
batteries - Reusable dependencies for games made with lua (especially with love)
lgi - Dynamic Lua binding to GObject libraries using GObject-Introspection