Ask HN: Anyone know anything about Lua?

[callmeed]

I'm looking at developing a Lightroom plugin (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshoplightroom/)

No idea why Adobe chose to use it, but I thought I'd ask if anyone out there has experience with it.

Is it fairly easy to get rolling with?

Is there much of a community of Lua hackers?

Would it be hard to find some one if I wanted to contract out the job?

[sgoraya]

I've used Lua for video game scripting - it was pretty quick and easy to learn (I had a C/C++ background).

There is a relatively large community of help - I got a lot of tips from the list-servs.

Not hard at all to find coders with Lua experience - I assume most will have a video game coding background, but should be able to get something coded for you - post it on Odesk, rentacoder, et. al. and you'll have no problems

[triplefox]

Lua is well-liked because it's runs very close to C and easy to embed against, it's Algol-like, it has no dependencies beyond C itself, and it performs decently. It isn't as widely used as Python or Ruby because being embedded means it has a tiny standard library, and correcting that would go against the strengths of the language. (There's code and libraries out there, but it's all fragmented)

That said, the community is out there, and pretty widespread.

[corysama]

Although their syntaxes differ, Lua and Javascript are functionally very similar. Lua is like Javascript without the burden of maintenance-by-committee.

Lua is very small, very portable, very easy to embed and extend in C/C++ based apps and is one of the fastest interpreted languages available. These features taken together are why Lua is the industry standard for runtime scripting in games.

You should be aware, however, that unlike Ruby or Python, Lua's standard library is intentionally minimal and available add-on libraries are relatively sparse. The intention is that you are not inheriting a fat body of functionality when you adopt Lua. Instead you are starting with a slick, flexible core and customizing it into exactly what your app needs.

[callmeed → corysama]

Cool, thanks.

I'm assuming since Adobe already has an SDK for Lightroom that I wont have to do much customizing ... rather, just interact with their libraries.

[Tangurena]

We were looking to add scripting to one of our products. The choices ended up getting narrowed to Lua or Python. Microsoft's support for Python (as IronPython) tipped the scales for us (we're a Microsoft shop, so if MS makes/supports it, our boss goes that way).

I thought Lua was a better fit, but I got overruled.

>Is it fairly easy to get rolling with?

Yes. I thought so.

>Is there much of a community of Lua hackers?

I suspect that since it is a Brazilian invention, that they're be a lot more down south.

If you look for books on Lua, there aren't a lot of them.

[bayareaguy]

Lua is my favorite language to use when I need to make some systems level code configurable or extensible in simple ways.

Based on the traffic at http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l I'd say there is a small but healthy and growing community.