lua [ was: Bash shell support? ]

Rich Felker dalias at aerifal.cx
Mon Aug 28 03:28:01 UTC 2006


On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 09:52:36PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Saturday 26 August 2006 7:50 pm, Natanael Copa wrote:
> > Now if lua will make it to mainstream busybox, then lua sounds very much
> > more interesting.
> > 
> > Is it realistic to expect it to go into busybox 1.3?
> 
> I make no promises.  I haven't seen the patch yet (you mentioned it could 
> possibly be trimmed down below 50k, that would improve its acceptability to 
> me), I haven't learned the language yet, and I haven't heard much feedback 
> from anybody else yet.
> 
> However, of all the various scripting langauges I've seen, lua is the only one 
> I can't immediately rule _out_ as going into BusyBox.  Even Python (my 
> scripting language of choice) is just too darn big.  The idea of adding perl 
> is laughable.  PHP is, as you point out, 3 megabytes.
> 
> I believe Manuel Nova was thinking about writing a new scripting language for 
> BusyBox, back when he had more time.  I believe I pointed him at Lua.

A new scripting language or something based on Lua might be desirable.
While Lua is very small to implement I suspect the memory usage is
larger than it should be and I know the performance will be bad on
many embedded systems since all arithmetic is floating point. Still, I
like Lua.. :)

Rich




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