Lua Workshop

California,

Wow, took some determined effort to find out wtf a Lua is via this link. Very, very little to do with embedded processing, and absolutely nothing to do with hula dancing or the eating of poi. When posting to newsgroups whose members are unlikely to have too much experience in desktop bloatware extension languages, it may be considered courteous to give at least a three or four word description of the subject of your post.

Cheers, Alf

I found it by typing "

I fully agree that a short description of lua would be useful - it's not a language many have come across (at least, not in this group). However, it does have *something* to do with embedded processing. Lua is a scripting language, more legible than perl and smaller than python. It is provided as a set of C functions, and is thus entirely practical to implement as a scripting language for embedded systems, at least for 32-bit micros.

Really? It took just two rather obvious clicks from the page that came up. Same thing if you google for "Lua".

to

Actually, I'm about to use Lua in an embedded system. It is hardly a bloat for what it does. Embedded systems are not necessarily 8 bit'ers with a few k of memory these days.

DJ

I'd be curious to know more about your setup here, and how well it works out - I'm vaguely considering lua myself. Am I right in thinking you can pre-compile (to byte code) lua code first, and thus avoid the overhead of the compiler/intepreter in the embedded system? And is it practical to compile lua using only integers instead of floating point numbers?

David

Yes, but you only avoid the compiler. The interpreter is needed for running the code, of course. The compiler modules of the Lua core account for around 35% of the total size of the Lua core (which is small anyway).

Yes.

BTW, sorry for not posting details about Lua when I announced the workshop.

--lhf

I can't go into much detail, but in this system memory is not an issue. Anyway, the footprint of a complete Lua environment is not more than a couple of hundred kB. I see Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo answered your other questions.

BTW, this is a good opportunity :-) :

Luiz - lots thanks to you and the rest of the Lua team. Great work!

DJ