Show HN: Lua/C for mobile devices – Please tell me what you think | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lua/C for mobile devices – Please tell me what you think

github.com

58 pointsvladpalos12 comments

It is a nice little hacking project. However, it is not built on top of the Kernel (which would be possible using e.g. something like ljsyscall).

A look over at LuaJIT and its FFI would probably also be nice in the context of this project.

However, it is probably deemed to be a little pet project forever. It does away with about everything that Android provides, including the developer APIs that are often implemented in a proprietary way the closer you get to the driver layer.

The "Android without cumbersome Java and NDK" (from another comment) is - arguably - not an Android at all. It is a Linux kernel and the glibc, with lots of the hardware not accessible.

I've been going through a remotely similar experience when working on and with the Koreader project (http://github.com/koreader/koreader, a document/ebook reader software aimed at e-ink devices, which often come with not much beside the kernel and glibc, plus a framebuffer to play on) and it takes some major design effort to create a proper event/GUI framework. Which we did in the Koreader project using Lua, too - it's just so nice a Language to prototype with. For Android - a platform we support for devices - we went via NDK (only a small wrapper, https://github.com/koreader/android-luajit-launcher). Though we have an SDL (1&2) backend, too, in addition to a purely Kernel framebuffer/input API oriented backend. Maybe worth a look, though also maybe an overwhelming amount of code to begin with.

>>The "Android without cumbersome Java and NDK" (from another comment) is - arguably - not an Android at all. It is a Linux kernel and the glibc, with lots of the hardware not accessible.

MOAI suits the bill in this regard - all the hardware is available, and in some ways the MOAI host is more of a host OS than anything else .. giving true freedom, but of course more responsibility: the GUI frameworks available are not as polished (yet) as they are in the Android sphere but for some this may well be a positive argument for involvement in a non-vendor approach in the first place ..

MOAI: http://getmoai.com/ Hanappe GUI for MOAI: http://github.com/makotok/Hanappe

The patches which integrate Binder with the kernel are also a fundamental part of Android. Also, they don't use glibc they use Bionic, which is based on one of the BSDs.

The idea to build a full operating system in Lua/C is a good one .. and in fact there are others working on a similar effort. I know the luvit guys (luvit = node in Lua) are interested, and in the MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) community there have been rumblings as well. An embedded OS with luvit for the backend and MOAI for the front-end would seriously kick ass .. in fact, I think I'll work on that. :)

Also my project ljsyscall https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall - you can run this on bare metal on Xen and other platforms too as well as under Linux/OSX/BSD.

Wow, nice! I'm going to give this a bit of a spin ..

Hey,

First of all thank you for all the comments!

@fit2rule: Yes, that is exactly my intention! I've also been working on a MOAI-based game and I love MOAI and the guys behind it. It also has a great enthusiastic community and a great/clean C++ source code. That is my next move: to use MOAI. And I think Luvit is also great (on my TODO list there is also a LuaJIT integration so Luvit will fit perfectly).

@hwh: You're right. It's not built on top of the kernel, it uses the Android-flavor kernel. Also koreader looks like a great project!

@StavrosK: Thank you! That's not forgivable :) I think I was overenthusiastic.

@dimman: Thank you! I was in a hurry but I'll fix that.

It's really nice to see so many people interested in this! I'll keep you posted!

Bravo. AOSP hacker of 4 years and I have been meaning to write something like this for a while but never got around to it. Would love to contribute. Please add a few guidelines to the README.

Great job! By the way, pet peeve: It's Lua, not LUA.

This looks like a great idea, I'll be tracking its development for sure. Android without cumbersome Java and NDK sounds like pure bliss.

That won't be Android by definition.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Android-System-Archit...

Quick note: Looks like you've checked in your swap files filename.c~ in the repository. These should probably be deleted and add an entry to ignore *.c~ in the gitignore file.

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