alt Hacker NewsI ask this question, but instead: I ask it of Lua.
As in, what if there was a Linux distro that focused, primarily, on building a Lua layer on top of everything, system-wise. Just replace all the standard stuff with one single, system-friendly language: Lua. C/C++ everything as it currently is: put Lua on top all the way to the Desktop.
It’s only a thought experiment, except there are cases where I can see a way to use it, and in fact have done it, only not to the desktop, such as of course embedded. Realtime data collection, processing and management. In this case, it is superlative to have a single system/app language on top of C/C++.
So I think there may be a point in the future where this ‘single language for everything’ becomes a mantra in distro land. I see the immense benefit.
Lua table state can be easily transferred, give or take a bit of resource management vis a vis sync’ing state and restoring it appropriately. Lua Bytecode, itself, in a properly defined manner can serve as a perfectly cromulant wire spec. Do it properly and nobody will ever know it isn’t just a plain ol’ C struct on an event handler, one of the fastest, except it’ll be very well abstracted to the application.
Oh, and if things are doing bytecode, may as well have playback and transactions intrinsically… it is all, after all, just a stream.
App state as gstreamer plugin? Within grasp, imho…
Replies
Wouldn't you face the same problem as Dotnet on Windows? AFAIK, dotnet based frameworks and apps suffered from huge performance issues. It might have improved in recent times, I am not actually a windows dev.
If just the end user application is in Lua, then maybe it's fine and the high level language slowdown won't matter. If you want to wrap the low level kernel APIs etc in a high level language as the canonical interface, I would be very skeptical.
Join the EDA industry, and you can have TCL. :D
Do it. Build on the work of AwesomeWM probably, it's a Lua focused window manager that's quite nice. You can also build up less "minimalist" widgets and whatnot using Lua and claude code, which is very good at unconventional GUI work in Lua. I can attest to this specifically, I've had it build numerous GUIs with mpv Lua userscripts.
100%
There used to be a roguelike game called Angband, which was written in C. There was a vibrant community around it, many of whom produced Angband variants by hacking the text config files and the C code. One developer got the idea of making most of the game scriptable in Lua, over a C core; which would, in theory, make even more people be able to hack at the game and produce variants.
What happened was the Angband community imploded, and the number of variants went way down.
I don't know if this is a generalizable example and there may have been other factors at work, but it is a cautionary tale.
Angband is still around btw, and is still excellent. But I believe it's C and text config files again now.