[Ffmpeg-devel] SVN dump

[Dave Dodge]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 12:56:09PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 05:38:46PM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> > That said, the more elegant the language, the nastier the implementation
> > tends to be.  This suggests that many of these languages are best left
> > to the academics and not used for real-world projects.
> 
> I haven't RTFS'd, but I suspect Lua may be the one exception: both
> elegant and clean.

Yes, whenever I've gone poking around in the Lua source I've found it
to be very easy to read; the fact that it's got size and portability
as design goals probably helps quite a bit.  Also, the interface
between Lua and C (when using one language to call the other) is a
thing of beauty.

A downside (or upside, depending on your point of view) to Lua is that
it doesn't have the extensive bundled libraries of things like Python,
Perl, Ruby, etc.  You can get such libraries, or roll your own, but
they aren't standardized.  The fact that new major versions of Lua are
usually not backwards-compatible also means that out-of-tree libraries
can lag well behind Lua releases.

That said I'm definitely a fan of Lua.  I even patched the "mutt"
build I'm using to read this, so that I could write some custom
extensions for it in Lua.

> Scheme and lisp implementations could be nice too if their
> implementors didn't introduce gross levels of complexity and
> nonportability for the sake of irrelevant micro-optimiztions.

I've written a couple of small Lisp interpreters over the years, as
part of larger applications (to do processing that needed to be
extensible, or was simply more easily expressed in functional terms).
These days I'd probably just use Lua instead.

                                                  -Dave Dodge