sqlite.lua VS Penlight

I have been working on restructuring telescope-frecency.nvim. One of the biggest changes is removing dependency for sqlite.lua.

I'd like to share my first real attempt at a Neovim plugin and hopefully get feedback and help on how whether this is something others would be interested in and how to improve it. annotate.nvim is a plugin that allows you set/edit brief notes that are tied to lines in your code. It uses Neovim's extended marks for tracking the location of your notes and kkharji's sqlite.lua plugin to allow you to restore the annotations when you restart Neovim. I'd been experimenting with using scratch buffers to hold notes while working to avoid my habit of cluttering code with comments, but this felt limited. When I saw this plugin I wanted to see if I could combine the ideas to get something more on-demand.

I'm currently working on a plugin that, it appears, is going to require the sqlite.lua package. According to its own README, it would require a couple of sqlite system packages (at least for linux) in order for it to run. However I've also come across some packages that have sqlite.lua as a dependency, but they don't inform the user in the readme about setting up sqlite on the system.

If you need to persist a lot of files, you could use sqlite3 as database through something like sqlite.lua

legendary.nvim v2.5.0 now supports frecency sorting! It will be enabled by default if kkharji/sqlite.lua is also installed.

I think it is. Some neovim plugins such as Telescope which is widely used and praised use SQLite[1]

[1] https://github.com/kkharji/sqlite.lua#-powered-by-sqlitelua

To have enough batteries you kind of just need penlight[1] and maybe luastd. Of course there's posix, lfs, socket, luasec and you're semi set.

[1]: https://lunarmodules.github.io/Penlight/

https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight provides a bunch of functionality for stuff like that.

However, there's already a widely known, well-tested library in the lua community called penlight that covers a lot of lua's "missing" functionality. It's got sane string manipulation, ergonomic tables, a basic class mechanism, functional programming, enums, exceptions, path manipulation, etc...

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries and lume are focused on gamedev; Penlight aims at bringing the breadth of python's stdlib to lua; plenary.nvim for nvim plugins; and probably more for other domains. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back because I found some implementations confusing/overcomplicated/inconsistent).

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. This was one of my initial roadblocks. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries, Penlight, or the aforementioned lume. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back).

As for batteries, there's things like penlight which comes with a huge set of pure Lua libraries inspired by Python. And, well, there's Fennel libraries with macros and more lispy style APIs.

I'm very surprised there was no mention of Penlight in that article. Penlight, a supplemental standard library for Lua that is heavily inspired by Python's own standard library, has been around for years now:

https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight