luv VS nvim-lua-guide

Hi, I had this issue and I solved it by building https://github.com/luvit/luv myself.

To answer the OP's question, you could tackle luv and libuv ecosystem, as a way to connect Lua to real-world systems (files, sockets, servers...). That's one way to put Lua skills to use, there are other great answers in the thread. Another recommendation is to go through Programming in Lua book, especially the later chapters where you learn how Lua talks to the host application.

Alternatively you can get into the weeds and play around with the in built vim.loop (which is really just luv, specifically spawn to run commands on the OS and handle stdout processing via stream.

Unfortunately I doubt they are able to use netrw, it interfaces with user facing buffers too much. Telescope uses plenary which uses lua's luv implementation (bound to vim.loop). Fzf-lua uses an external binary called fzf

Lua is still actively used so there is a great number of libraries that came out in last 9 years. A decent example is the luv library that is packed with great functionality. On the whole I'm quite satisfied with the ecosystem, but it all depends on the domain.

You should be able to find plenty of examples of asynchronous code at https://github.com/luvit/luv and translate it.

The first thing I would recommend is read the official documentation. Both libuv and luvit (or more specifically luv)

I spent some time converting the luv documentation to make it available in :help and make the vim.loop module more discoverable. Thought plugin authors might be interested.

I'm assuming this one.

Nvim Lua guide

My main struggles beyond a simple problem are just the inability to find a way to easily debug things and the general process for setting up a plugin. I mostly work with Python/Jupyter, some C and Lua/Bash scripts, and usually you can either write tests/print debug for smaller scale things or get some stack trace if you have an error. With Neovim development, it just feels like there's nothing more besides update plugin, try on neovim, fail, bash head against wall, and repeat, and that doesn't quite seem efficient or correct - I'm sure there's something out there that should make the process easier. I tried looking online but I haven't found many that really fit my needs (most of the resources here seem more targeted towards creating your own init.lua, and Luadev plugin's commands are all broken (:Luadev-RunLine and any other command keeps telling me I got some trailing space). I'm really just looking to see how to make a snippet library, but there doesn't seem to be much that helps me. If someone could let me know how they debug their plugin or point me to any external resources, please let me know!

I have no guidance for the first point. For the second, checkout the neovim lua guide or : lua-guide

A quick google search turned up this codeacademy class on learning to program in Javascript. I didn't vet the whole thing, but it appears to assume you know nothing, which is what you need. If you go through that, you can then consume one of the resources that /u/luascriptdev post to equate that back to Lua. Again, the concepts translate.