heart VS luaforwindows

This is really timely article for me. I just chose to use Lua in a brand new project (https://github.com/Hyperspace-Logistics/heart) and lot of the criticism so far has been “why Lua?”

Personally I think it’s very capable language. It’s such a comfortable scripting language that I think nearly anybody could pick up and get up to speed pretty quickly. LuaJIT is also ridiculously powerful and so satisfyingly stable (Lua 5.1 for over a decade).

Heck Lua 5.1 even makes an excellent transpile target so you might not even need to use Lua to appreciate the software that runs on Lua.

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 It's out-of-date (Lua 5.1), but that's what CityBinder was made with anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter?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