kiwi VS Fennel

Nucleic also makes Kiwi one of the fastest Cassowary Constraint implementations. It is very useful for implementing custom GUIs as it can make building internal component layouts and general layout systems fairly straightforward and it’s very performant.

I highly encourage taking a look at it and it has also been ported to a wide range of language.

I’m using Nim kiwi with my own GUI library now. I’ll have to take a peak at how enaml is using kiwi for its layouts.

https://kiwisolver.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://github.com/alexbirkett/kiwi-java

https://github.com/PongoEngine/jasper

https://github.com/yglukhov/kiwi

If any of the Luau devs are watching this, please flesh out the metamethods. I'd switch almost everything to Luau if they were improved.

They're the biggest PITA right now as designed in PUC-Rio, and I see that while you've improved upon __eq, other metamethods are still lacking.

In PUC-Rio, boolean equality operators FORCE a boolean result, regardless of what you return. Ideally they would allow returning any result type, which then can be coerced to boolean later (e.g. by an `if` statement), just like the arithmetic operators do.

Further, `__neq`, `__ge` and `__gt` do not exist. They should.

The lack of a proper metamethod design means that binding to e.g. Kiwi[0] is impossible without some incredibly fugly hacks. It has been a long-standing annoyance with Lua in an otherwise beautiful little scripting language (that I use frequently).

This looks quite nice - lots of attempts in this space but nothing that attempts to match Lua to this degree.

[0] https://github.com/nucleic/kiwi

It's interesting: minimal software is out there, but folks don't tend to choose it. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to be conservative in my dependencies, and this encourages a lightweight stack that tends to perform pretty well. These days, I'm favoring tools like Lua, SQLite, Fennel[0], Althttpd[1], Fossil[2], and the Mako Server[3] and find that great, lightweight, stable, efficient software is to be had, for free, but you have to go a bit off the beaten path. This isn't stuff you hear about on Stack Overflow.

In terms of frontend, which the post focuses on (Google Docs and a 30MB doc), I guess I'm conflicted. While I tend to favor native apps + web pages, I'm also a daily Tiddlywiki user, and I really think web apps have their place (heck, one idea I'm working on is a lightweight local server that lets you run web apps like Tiddlywiki). But without a doubt, Tiddlywiki is more resource intensive than Emacs (my go-to for notetaking when I'm not on TW). My tab for a 6MB Tiddlywiki file uses 155MB of RAM, and my (heavily customized, dozens of open buffers) Emacs session uses 88MB. So I do think the author has a good point.

[0]: https://fennel-lang.org/

Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

https://fennel-lang.org

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

* https://fennel-lang.org/

I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.

If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.