

Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources - MaxScheiber
https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua

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spb
"awesome-lua" is probably not a good choice of name as the most common
association of "awesome" with "Lua" is the Lua-based Awesome window manager.

~~~
LewisJEllis
This is a totally valid point which I considered, but I think the association
of awesome-<language> for lists like this is more valuable, since part of the
purpose is to make it accessible for people outside the lua world (who
probably won't know about awesomeWM anyway).

~~~
Sander_Marechal
But you make life a lot more difficult for people who do use the Awesome
Window Manager, because it becomes much harder for us to find solutions to
problems using Google for instance.

~~~
LewisJEllis
'awesome-lua' is not typically a phrase/term referring to the Awesome WM. On
GitHub, there is only one awesome-wm-related repo by the name `awesome-lua`;
it's just one person's configuration and hasn't been updated since 2012. I
don't think I'm stepping on anybody's toes here.

Typically, the window manager is referred to as either just 'awesome' or as
'awesome wm'. awesome-lua is not a name conflict with 'awesome' or with
'awesome wm', and the worst case for search results is that awesome-lua shows
up and bumps everything else down by one spot. As klibertp suggested, adding
'wm' to your query makes awesome-lua not show up at all; claiming that I 'make
life a lot more difficult' is rather silly.

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tjkells
Can we PLEASE not refer people to penlight anymore? It's half broken, poorly
documented, and poorly maintained. It drives me crazy to see it referred to
all over the place as a good example of anything.

That being said, this is FANTASTIC. Due to the nature of lua it may well
always lack a good community but thankfully people seem to be trying.

~~~
LewisJEllis
Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely
a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list
is to provide an overview of what's out there.

As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any
inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of
microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be
reconsidered.

~~~
walterbell
> Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community

Is that for technical reasons or because Lua is commonly used in proprietary
apps?

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castell
The Lua language and LuaJIT are great.

The user base is fragmented (version 4, 5.1 (LuaJIT) vs 5.2), as Lua is
usually used as embedded language (alongside C, C++, ...) for video games
(World of Warcraft, Far Cry, ...), applications (Adobe Lightroom, ...), etc.

And the [http://lua.org](http://lua.org) website is a bit too minimalistic to
offer community features. The project only hosts a mailing list and a old-
school wiki. The additional libraries are/were hosted on
[http://luaforge.net](http://luaforge.net) , an outdated sourceforge clone.
The documentation is static and the development process itself is not so open.
The Lua language standard library is lacking functions almost every other
language ship with their default package (so everyone has to either find &
download additional libraries or reinvent the wheel).

Other languages like PHP have a documentation that allows the community to add
comments and code samples.

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walterbell
If someone created a community site with editable docs, do you think it would
gain traction?

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sheetjs
There is another awesome-lua list that predates this one:
[https://github.com/forhappy/awesome-lua](https://github.com/forhappy/awesome-
lua)

The "master list": [https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-
awesomeness](https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness)

~~~
LewisJEllis
Indeed; I have no claim to originality. The pre-existing list is (extremely)
incomplete, and gives a laundry list of outdated and unmaintained libraries
which are often not useful or broadly relevant. Such entries dilute the
usefulness of all other entries on the list, so I made this version to avoid
that (and to be more complete).

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walterbell
Why isn't a search engine sufficient for discovering <foo-language> packages
and resources? Historically, human-edited lists don't have a long archival
lifetime, e.g. original Yahoo, DMOZ, Mahalo.

If curation is better than search, why is a curated list better hosted at
github than Wikipedia, which has a lower technical cost of editing? If the
problem is Wikipedia moderation, who will reconcile multiple github curated
lists?

Is the expectation that github's "awesome-xyz" repos will rank higher in
Google search results than a curated Wikipedia page? Or is this github-
specific SEO?

~~~
LewisJEllis
A search engine is technically sufficient, but takes more time and is less
accessible. A search engine won't put things in front of you for you to peruse
and explore; you have to know what you're looking for. Beyond that, the
contributors and I have done research to find and decide on the entries on
this list, which should help readers avoid repeating the same process.

A git repo has an explicitly responsible maintainer, while wikipedia articles
do not. This helps keep the quality high.

Regarding SEO - even now, the same day I first pushed this, searching 'lua
awesome' returns this as result #5 on Google. 'awesome-<language>' is a known
convention for curated lists like this one, and people familiar with that
convention who are looking for Lua resources will easily find this.

~~~
walterbell
> the contributors and I have done research to find and decide on the entries
> on this list

It would be helpful to have a summary of selection criteria at the top of the
list, in addition to the longer version on the Contributing file.

If such curated lists were also available in JSON, developers could meta-
curate a locally searchable union of all their upstream projects. It would
then be easy to update, annotate or cross-reference lists.

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luastoned
Another site that has a nice overview is
[http://luapower.com](http://luapower.com)

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castell
Some more packages are on the LuaForge list:
[http://luaforge.net/projects/](http://luaforge.net/projects/)

(though LuaForge looks outdated)

Thanks for curating the list!

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J_Darnley
Your list of section anchor links appears to be broken. I click on any and
nothing happens. Otherwise I look forward to browsing it.

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LewisJEllis
Hm, they work fine for me; can you be more specific?

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J_Darnley
How can I be more specific than "I click on any and nothing happens"? The
links must point to non-existent anchors in the page. I'll go have a quick
look at the source but I don't know what it can tell me.

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seri
Does anybody know a stable Lua package for HTML scraping, preferrably similar
to Nokogiri or Beautiful Soup?

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alok-g
Can someone please recommend a library for music synthesis?

~~~
justincormack
The only thing I came across (not my area) was this
[http://worp.zevv.nl/](http://worp.zevv.nl/)

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degio
I wish I had this list when I started programming in Lua.

