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Comment by kristopher | Hacker News Reader

I think this mostly has to do with the 'Batteries -not- included' approach of Lua.

This is mainly done to keep the language/vm compact and embeddable, yet what it leads to is many similar implementations of modules that do not play well together.

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I read a related article a while back: http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-... It's interesting to draw parallels to Lua, they both started out as embedded scripting languages with a small core.

Great article:-) I think managing the addition of batteries is definitely tricky for a language like Lua. Some of its users do not want any additional baggage: they want small, fast and easy to embed. Other people may want to use it as a 'scripting language', and thus want to have a bunch of libraries and additional goodies to get stuff done with.

This. Lua doesn't even have a standard class/inheritance model. If you want that, you implement it in-language. There are some nice general purpose ones out there, but nothing canonical.

If someone makes a killer web framework on top of one of these models, that might establish the standard and bootstrap the Lua scene, kind of like how Rails established a lot of idioms for Ruby.

re: makes a killer web framework

There have been two Ruby web framework ported to Lua:

* Orbit (http://orbit.luaforge.net/) - Camping port

* Mercury (http://github.com/nrk/mercury) - Sinatra port

There's also Kepler (http://www.keplerproject.org/), which I haven't used, and WSAPI (http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/), which is roughly like Rack or WSGI. It's not a "web framework", but using WSAPI with FastCGI works well for CGI-ish stuff.

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