luaforwindows VS pallene

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 It's out-of-date (Lua 5.1), but that's what CityBinder was made with anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter?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

It would have been nice if LuaX was written in Lua.

Forking Pallene (https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene) would introduce:

Terra and Nelua are both very different in goals than Teal. Teal is literally gradual types integrated into Lua keeping as many of Lua's idioms as possible (to a fault[1]). Terra and Nelua are both very metaprogrammable systems programming languages. Nelua's goals are primarily to soften C's rough edges, comparable to something like Nim.

There's another one you missed in Pallene[2]. But again, it's goal was to optimize the stack sharing involved in using the C API. It also adds types though and maintains Lua idioms as much as possible.

[1]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/discussions/339

[2]: https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene

That was somewhat of an entertaining read.

> Terra is C if you replaced the preprocessor with Lua.

This is what is written on the tin.

PUC made there own version of Terra

Pallene http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/Gualandi-2020-SCP.pd...

https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3inzGGFefg

This is a good writeup on all the Alt-Luas https://injuly.in/blog/gsoc/

Odd to suggest that if they're interested in Lua, that they should check out Moonscript which is a different language altogether (although it compiles to Lua). But if you insist, something a little more Lua-ish is Teal[1] (gradual types ala TypeScript) or Pallene[2] (companion typed subset of Lua meant to generate optimized C libraries for use with Lua).

[1]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl

[2]: https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene

You might be thinking of Pallene (previously named Titan) https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene