Show HN: Lapis – A web framework for MoonScript and OpenResty | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lapis – A web framework for MoonScript and OpenResty

leafo.net

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Leafo, this looks great. I was not familiar with your MoonScript language prior to this.

Say, since you cite the benchmarks project, would you mind submitting a test case for Lapis?

Also, just out of curiosity, what did you use to create the canvas animation?

How he created the canvas animation: https://github.com/rprichard/x11-canvas-screencast

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445158

I'd definitely like it to be part of the benchmarks project. When I get some time I'll submit a pull request for it.

As mentioned in the other comment I use this for recording animations: https://github.com/rprichard/x11-canvas-screencast

Great! You are prolific! A language, a web framework, sites built upon that framework, and all of the documentation. You sure you're just one person?

People need to get out of this habit of embedding view/template in the backend code. It's impractical and problematic in any situation where there's division of labor.

Otherwise interesting web framework, makes me want to look into MoonScript.

Nice work!

This has pretty excellent documentation. Like really excellent documentation. But jumping into the code itself is a little bit of a beast with no tests or comments.

so: is testing on your roadmap?

Yes I'll have a better testing setup in the near future. (Right now there are individual unit tests scattered in the modules themselves)

Glad you like the documentation, I try to take pride in writing detailed documentation. :)

Pushed native moonscript support to busted[0] this morning. :D

[0] https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/busted/blob/master/spec/moon...

Busted is awesome - really nice test framework.

Awesome!

Interesting performance numbers. I am happy to see something past java frameworks working out so well.

Would be nice to add support for not-inlined templates with high-performance template engine like CTPP2 (ngx_ctpp2)

Looks interesting, but the use of "\" instead of "." is really a turnoff. Why do languages (I'm looking at you, PHP) think that using the backslash in any other way than escaping is a good idea?

Couldn't agree more. I've am looking at Lua for a new project and got excited when I saw this. However, that syntax looks terrible.

What's worse, is it is inconsistent. Take:

  csrf.assert_token @
  Users\create name: @params.username

I don't get why they both can't be '.', which would be very readable and approachable to everyone.

All that said, this looks great given it is built on OpenResty (whose performance seems outstanding at initial blush). Wonder if anyone has deployed anything really big with it.

I've used moonscript a lot, and don't particularly like the \ syntax. However, you get used to it quickly, and it stops seeming like such a big deal.

It would be hard to have both be '.', because of lua semantics: '.' means "get the property from the table", while ':' in lua and '\' in moonscript mean "get the function from this table, with the first parameter for that function bound to the table itself".

Javascript/Coffeescript can get away with both being '.' because of the horrible mess that is implicit 'this'. All functions have an implicit first parameter, that non-method functions usually ignore, and '.' in javascript does the equivalent of ':' and '\' in moonscript (for functions). I find the lua approach much simpler and cleaner, and think it is actually more approachable than the javascript way, because the difference between '.' and ':' or '\' is conceptually simpler than all the rules behind 'this' in javascript.

Programming in Lua explains ':' in http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html , and probably has a better explanation that I wrote :).

Would you recommend learning Lua first before going into moonscript ?

I learned them concurrently, translating lua in Programming in Lua into the equivalent moonscript. It's a pretty strait-forward translation and is definitely doable. I already had experience with a reasonable variety of languages before learning it though, and for people still getting into programming, I think Lua is a simpler and still awesome language.

I don't think it's possible to learn moonscript without learning lua concurrently, since lua makes up so much of the underlying semantics. So I think the choice is either (a) learn lua, or (b) learn lua and moonscript for some nice syntactic sugar.

`.` and `\` in Moonscript map to `.` and `:` in Lua.

In Lua, `foo.bar` is just syntactic sugar for `foo["bar"]`, a table lookup with a string key.

In turn, `foo:bar(baz)` is syntactic sugar for `foo.bar(foo, baz)`.

It is not uncommon to mix things up, and put a dot instead of the column. IIRC, Leafo used the backslash instead because it is more distinct, visually.

    Users\create name: @params.username

is thus equivalent to

    Users.create( Users, name: @params.username )

(adding parens for maximum clarity).

see https://github.com/leafo/moonscript/issues/35

. is taken. : is taken. propose a better alternate and maybe it'll end up in the language.

I really don't see why \ has anything do with escaping when not in the context of a string (or regex) literal. There is no ambiguity whatsoever. It's a shame more languages don't use it because it's easy to type (no shift required).

It's not easy to type on some keyboard layouts such as the finnish one though (alt gr and - of american layout) http://frontype.com/keyboarding/540px-Computer-keyboard-Swed...

I agree it's the same on a danish keyboard

amazing work man! I was thinking in creating something like that but with mruby. Lua is a good option too. It is a perfect fit to use with Angular.js

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