If there is someone reading this who wants to work on LuaJIT full time and thinks they have relevant background then please contact me.
My uninformed outsider's impression is that Mike Pall wasn't really widely successful at getting funding for the work he wanted to do on Luajit (e.g. new GC) – despite being probably the world's foremost JIT for dynamic languages expert[1] and the mileage that many extremely wealthy companies seem to have gotten out of luajit (e.g. I understand it plays a pretty important role in your firewall logic, and probably not one that would be easily replaced with some other technology).
I don't mean to single Cloudflare out for criticism, I'm aware that you have in fact funded Mike's work in the past. And maybe there is absolutely no relationship between Mike moving on and funding for luajit.
But since you replied here, I'd be genuinely interested to hear your perspective on this:
To me it appears that apparently even single-developer open source projects which directly affect the bottomline of large companies can struggle to make enough money to continue their work. Why is this?
[1] Seeing how he essentially single handedly wrote a JIT that seems superior in many respects to what the likes of Google have managed to achieve with Javascript after many lifetimes' worth of top developer effort.
I'll pass him your offer.
I also worked on a JS2Lua transpiler, which is called exactly the same btw, for a university assignment (https://github.com/Etiene/js2lua) , but it's trash and I never really finished it until it incorporated all native JS functions and was actually usable. I have so many ideas that could use this. This is awesome. Thank you so much!
From the outside the message I am receiving is "hurry up and wait for a new maintainer to emerge from closed-door discussions between Mike, CloudFlare, and unspecified other parties." However, this has been the situation for over a year now, and presumably there have already been fruitless discussions with all of the obvious candidates. (Reading between the lines I suspect that the job description was "Mike Pall 2.0" and the qualified candidates were simply too expensive, but that is speculation.)
So what next for LuaJIT users? Keep waiting? Create a fork? Whine on Hacker News?
Personally I don't think we need a "Mike Pall 2.0." What we need is mere-mortal active maintainers who can review, merge, and maintain extensions developed by the community. This work could conceivably be spread between many hands -- if some of those hands would have a commit bit. I think it unfortunate that excellent work like Thomas Fransham's intrinsics implementation are stuck in limbo because there is nobody available to review and commit them.
End rant. I say this as a lover of LuaJIT and somebody who is using it for the long haul and thus very interested in its ongoing development.
Source: https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/45#issuecomment-2340...