Also interesting is that https://luajit.org/status.html now states “LuaJIT is actively developed and maintained” (whereas for the last ~5 years, “actively” isn’t a word I’d have used), and makes reference to a TBA development branch.
This makes me soooo happy to hear because with all of the forks of LuaJIT post it not being maintained by Mike ~5 years ago, no one seems to carry the baton very well.
LuaJIT is truly an engineering marvel that more folks should adopt.
If it's actively being maintained again, hopefully that will happen.
What I don't quite get is the follow:
"Please note: The main LuaJIT author (Mike Pall) is working on unrelated projects and cannot accept bigger sponsorships at this time. But other community members may be open to sponsorship offers — please ask on the LuaJIT mailing list for any takers."
> DO NOT use pseudo-releases or tarballs created by third parties. In particular, automatic tarballs made by GitHub and other mirrors are lacking the .git directory and will not properly build anymore.
It's a little concerning that their build process relies on a .git directory being present. That's going to make it quite tough for packagers to actually package this.
If the attribute export-subst is set for a file then Git will expand several placeholders when adding this file to an archive. The expansion depends on the availability of a commit ID, i.e., if git-archive[1] has been given a tree instead of a commit or a tag then no replacement will be done. The placeholders are the same as those for the option --pretty=format: of git-log[1], except that they need to be wrapped like this: $Format:PLACEHOLDERS$ in the file. E.g. the string $Format:%H$ will be replaced by the commit hash. However, only one %(describe) placeholder is expanded per archive to avoid denial-of-service attacks.
I'm confused what you mean. What is a packager doing here? I always assumed that the intention of this library is that you, as a developer, compile and embed it in a product that needs a scripting engine. What use would a standalone LuaJIT package be?
Even ignoring the installed interpreter, libraries on Linux distributions are usually installed system-wide as their own packages which other packages depend on (neovim, mpv, cgit, etc.)
if you apt install libluajit-5.1-dev you can compile and link your c programs with it without having to compile it yourself
similarly if you are writing programs in lua rather than in c you can run them in luajit if you just apt install luajit
if you want to release your programs as free software so other people can compile and link them, it's important for them to be able to get the version of luajit you were using so they can debug why your program doesn't work in the current version of luajit
> Surely a packager would be working off of the actual releases not a random git archive?
There are no official releases. To quote from the linked email:
> No release tarballs or binaries are made available. Please do not use obsolete versions from older tarballs or zip files. Please remove any outdated links to these downloads -- they will cease to work soon.
The only way to get a release version of LuaJIT is to compile it from the git repo.
The packagers can make their own snapshot, but they don't want to grab a full .git directory for the source - distributions such as Debian never want to do that: The packager is responsible for auditing all the code including copyright status in the artifacts - best not have the whole history of the project included in that case, because the task is then a little bit too big.
You can clone a specific tag or branch from a git repository without the full history. It looks like LuaJIT's git repository does not support this, although the github mirror does:
Huh. I thought this project was abandoned, with the beta 2.1 being the latest version for many years now, and the new GC having never been implemented. But looking at the page now, all mention of this has been deleted. Has work on it resumed? Exciting!
Went to the site and could not find info about Lua version support, is LuaJIT still Lua5.1 only these days? I hope it can support newer versions, e.g. 5.4 etc.
5.1 and a few features from 5.2 such as hexadecimal escapes in strings. I could be woefully out of date but they are/were listed here http://luajit.org/extensions.html
I wish people wouldn't do this. It makes it very confusing to know when it makes sense to upgrade, and depending on your luck you'd be getting a version that has a bug fixed in the commit right after, but you wouldn't know because nobody announced a patch release.
I get that release engineering adds a lot of overhead but it helps build a lot of trust between the developer and the user.
LuaJIT is in a very weird place overall. Some years ago, the main developer announced that they were stepping down. A bunch of forks sprang up as a result. Meanwhile, the main developer declined to put anyone else in charge of the project, and basically kept developing it on their own (albeit at a slower pace). The forks eventually died; no one was able to build enough momentum to keep a community going.
So this policy was basically where we were anyway. I'm glad the project hasn't died, and in my practical usage it's been very stable, so I haven't had trouble grabbing random development commits off the Git repo. My impression was the release process was very high overhead, and I'd rather that the main developer stick around to work on the code rather than leave due to burning out.
In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's existence and it's only been in the last couples of years they have begun to use Rust.
I don't know about you but a 3x performance increase going from a scripting language with fast iteration times to a programming language that has long compilation times plus a borrow checker is hardly worth the risk of a rewrite to the average company.
Add on top the fact that one of the performance problems was interfacing nginx with luajit, aka there are two unnecessary memory copies.
When I think about these things, I'm thinking cloudflare was lucky enough to outgrow lua rather than being lucky to have gotten away with luajit.
I haven't looked at LuaJIT, but Lua is written in this weird bastard language using the C preprocessor. All of the terseness of Lisp, with no type system (since it's the C preprocessor), and the added fun of pointer arithmetic.
I have no complaints about the language (other than arrays starting at 1). I'm just salty because other people have said the implementation was really clean C, so I decided to spend a week porting it to C#, and I gave up. I could not figure out how closures were actually implemented, and I spent a day trying to understand it.
That weird bastard language is called C. It's really easy to hack on the lua codebase, either adding stuff to it or using it as the base for other languages. Provided you can read C, anyway.
Luajit has a really complicated build process. I'm more nervous about changing that codebase.
I used to have problems with luajit. I tried it out right now and it works. Even the ffi is working properly without having to resort to a janky GitHub fork (that one doesn't work on ARM for me).
