[impdev] Lua plugins for Imprudence!

[Morgaine]

I was delighted to read this in the impdev transcript of 2010-10-13:

>  Robin Cornelius: hmm, if you are going to the trouble of rewriting might
just as well do it properly and bolt LUA on
>  Jacek Antonelli: I'm also planning on doing that, Robin. Heh.
>  Jacek Antonelli: But that's another story.

Sounds like plugins are back on the front burner at last, hooray! :D

As a Lua user since it was created, and continually advocating its use for
embedding in AW Groupies, this sounds like a good move.

It's not a free lunch.  Direct embedding has a TON of problems once you go
beyond the simple cases, but when the alternatives are either direct
embedding or nothing, then it's no contest.  I'll just be glad that we'll
have scripting plugins of some kind, rather than none.

I've mostly been using Lua as a replacement for config files --- it's so
much easier, cleaner, and more powerful to let Lua worry about parsing and
just hand your main program clean config data.  But Lua can do so much more,
and at the other end of the spectrum, the engine's reentrancy allows you to
run any number of instances of the VM in parallel in system threads.  That
may well become necessary in the viewer.

In addition, Lua has coroutines built in, and the Copas library builds upon
them to provide a very simple yet powerful interface to network services.
This could become very important as interop gains ground, because we'll be
needing to access multiple services concurrently.

Good news, I'm looking forward to this!


Morgaine.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.imprudenceviewer.org/pipermail/impdev-imprudenceviewer.org/attachments/20101016/80960e28/attachment-0001.htm>