gravity VS luaforwindows

I found out that the Parrot programming language (https://github.com/parrot-language/parrot) did copycat line by line my Gravity programming language (https://github.com/marcobambini/gravity).

I know that I used a very permissive license and that the project can be forked and modified by anyone but this is a theft more than a fork.

What can I do in this situation?

This is gonna be subjective, because it depends on what your priorities are.

The two alternatives at the top of my list are Gravity and Wren. They are both designed for the same general profile that Lua has—a scripting language, safe to use, embeddable, with a small VM (low code size).

- https://github.com/marcobambini/gravity

- https://wren.io/

The language design choices are nice and familiar to people who are used to other existing languages. Lua is a bit radical.

Two other options are AngelScript and Squirrel, which are both a bit older and more mature than Gravity and Wren. In my opinion they are

- http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/

- http://squirrel-lang.org/

Finally, it’s much more feasible these days to embed something like Mono, and Guile has gotten a lot better.

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:

If you're trying to install for Windows, https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows

Earlier, I submitted Lua For Windows to the Winget repository.

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 It's out-of-date (Lua 5.1), but that's what CityBinder was made with anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter?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.

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.

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/