awesome-lua VS Fennel

If you're familiar with awesome-lists, you'll be happy to know that an awesome-lua repository does in fact exist. This list contains more interesting stuff about the language, along with going deeper into certain niches that I'm not even going to start to touch.

Lua has a lot going for it. Its memory footprint is nicely small, its practical expressiveness is quite high (though not as high as Python's or Perl's), luajit's runtime performance is very good for such a highly-expressive language, and it has a great set of libraries integrating with a lot of commonly-used services.

I believe there is a way to accomplish this without seeking input from people on Reddit or message boards for new domains to contribute to.

There are lists on Github that curate libraries native to a particular programming language. For example, there is a list for Lua (https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua) and another for Python (https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python). Explore these lists to identify areas that may require assistance. Some of these lists have not been updated for years, so it is worthwhile to conduct additional research on the domain before undertaking a project.

I have personally completed a project using this approach, although I did have some background knowledge in that domain.

This was a list I got in my mind without googling... for more inspiration and see what others are doing take a look at awesome Lua: https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua

Check out awesome-love2d on github, there's tons of libraries for all sorts of stuff including UI. Also check out awesome-lua.

So I’m 100% not the person to ask but usually the “awesome” lists on GitHub are a good place to start. Here is the awesome-lua repo for example.

Disclaimer: i'm still new to this world as well, i went through this for making use of luacheck, a linter tool for Lua, but the possibilities are just endless, you can take a peek at some awesome-lua repo on GitHub to find out the amazing tools that you can implement to your projects

Look at all the awesome stuff you can do with Lua.

https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua#object-oriented-programming

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.