The power of Lua 5.1 (1 Viewer)

[The_GTA]

Dear Lua developers,

I am very happy to see a forum solely dedicated to the Lua programming language! Thank you for creating it

Anyway, I want to share my viewpoints on the Lua 5.1 language. I have been developing in Lua for more than 10 years now, from time to time. Did you know that Lua is not just a scripting language but can be used for full blown projects? One of my old projects is a full blown scripting IDE called resedit. My most recent project is a 3D software renderer for frustum-plane intersection. The beautiful part about this language is its simplicity: no program crash if you do something utterly wrong. Implementing this library is really neat because you can compile it as static library and it has no complex dependencies.

But there are some unfortunate drawbacks of Lua 5.1. The debug output cannot really be traced back very efficiently because you just see the most recent source code location on runtime error., not a full stack trace. How do newer Lua versions improve on this quality of life stuff?

Looking forward to hearing about your opinion! Maybe share your life-stories with Lua aswell.

- Martin

 

[younyokel]

Hello and welcome, Martin! Great to see new faces around and much more awesome is when they're not something but seniors!

My name is Edwin. I'm practicing Lua 5.1, little bit from Lua 5.3 (libraries like UTF-8) with LuaJIT using LÖVE framework. Great to know there is much more ways of using Lua.

Hope you're gonna stay here for longer! Sorry for lack of... well, attendance. We're going to get through it!

 

[The_GTA]

Hello younyokel

it is nice to hear from you! I am interested in newer versions of Lua because the developer did improve the performance as well as the functionality ("_ENV", light closures if no upvalues, no binary checking, etc). UTF-8 is very important because Unicode is the future.

Would like to have this forum be more active so that we can discuss all versions of Lua in more detail.

 

[Bonfire]

But there are some unfortunate drawbacks of Lua 5.1. The debug output cannot really be traced back very efficiently because you just see the most recent source code location on runtime error., not a full stack trace. How do newer Lua versions improve on this quality of life stuff?

I don’t understand what you mean. Lua (also 5.1) has a powerful debug library which can be used for detailed post mortem debugging and runtime debugging.
For lightweight debugging i use a pure lua debugger:

slembcke/debugger.lua

A simple, embedabble CLI debugger for Lua. Contribute to slembcke/debugger.lua development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

I use it even for embedded Lua running on a micro controller.

For full blown IDE debugging I use a Visual Studio code extension, cant say its name at the moment because I’m not on my development computer.