luacheck VS Prosody IM

Not directly related, but luacheck can also help with this.

Yeah. While you're at it, make a habit of running luacheck on your files as it helps catch a lot of these issues that can sneak in by mistake: https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck

Using something like https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck might be helpful too. Will check all the files in a directory and will let you know which one might be problematic.

I'm trying to setup luacheck (via null-ls) to run alongside sumneko-lua (via nvim-lspconfig).

Most of the time nothing is used. The thing is that iterating is so quick, that you find the problems really fast.

Although, I've been using luacheck https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck. It is quite nice, but you have to write down the global variables by hand on the config file.

Check out luacheck. It can help spot typos or mistakes you've made and warn against anti-patterns. I'd honestly only look into setting it up locally because there's no benefit to putting it in a CI pipeline unless you have one for another reason IMO. This should be all the config you need:

Sadly the scenario that the successor feature is intended to alleviate has very much become reality. The creator of Luacheck (Peter Melnichenko) passed away a couple of years ago, and ever since then the GitHub repository has been in a state of limbo. Multiple unofficial forks have come and gone, but Peter's is still the first result on Google if you search "luacheck". It isn't even possible to change the README or pin an issue to get people's attention about the fork; to this day people are still posting issues to the old repo.

And Luacheck is "the" Lua static analysis tool that pretty much everyone uses, so it's a very significant issue.

https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck/issues/198

You are probably right, but luacheck is well aware of which global variables are built-in and it has special comments, such as -- no global or --ignore in case you very want to overwrite them.

Calling your function self is as much bad practice as calling it print. Use luacheck to avoid such mistakes.

XMPP server using Prosody

lua on its own right can be fun too! If you are looking for a project to contribute to, there's for instance the Prosody XMPP server that's written in it, and contributes to the betterment of internet by promoting federated protocols.

There's also the http://prosody.im/ XMPP server that's written in Lua, and it's very successful there. The other major XMPP server implementation is in Erlang and they are equally praised, so that should tell something about Lua's versatility.

Take your pick. Or just look here.

You can write largish standalone application in Lua and it is not always a poor choice - Prosody [1] first comes to mind. But qualities which make it a good embedded language make it less _attractive_ for other uses.

Lua has very simple syntax and small stdlib which allows its implementation to be very small - you can add Lua to your application and not increase its size significantly. But when the size is not a concern most programmers prefer languages with rich, powerful syntax lots of features and batteries-included stdlib (which is completely opposite of Lua).

[1] https://prosody.im/

If you are really set on a LAN-only setup you could look at Prosody (combined with an Android app such as Conversations) which Snikket is based upon. It's not as "ready to go, out of the box" as Snikket and therefore requires a slightly higher skill level, but in exchange it is a lot more customizable and adaptable to different kinds of deployment scenarios.

Selfhosting XMPP is pretty simple with https://prosody.im/

My choice, because it's the stack I know very well, would be Prosody ( https://prosody.im/ - I'm one of the devs) and a web client such as Converse.js ( https://conversejs.org/ ). XMPP is highly extensible, Prosody is highly modular, which make them a good foundation for building on top of.

That said, the right stack is generally the one that matches your requirements, and (if this isn't primarily a learning exercise) whatever you're most familiar with. The hardest part of building a Discord or Slack-like in 2022 is actually not the technical stuff. There are many comprehensive open-source products already out there that compete with these companies, such as Mattermost, RocketChat and Element.