[ordiel]

The saddest of all this is the fact that "it is a lean platform that allows you to build what you want" (basically 'no bateries included') is considered as something to be praised, like "Look how small and simple its source code is"... Well of course it will be small and simple and there are few files that needed to be compiled for the whole thing, but in the "remote case" that you want to build anything meaningful with it you will need to write the other 1500 files (most certainly with "not as clean code") that many other more mature languages already have

Just don't be a hipster... In deed most languages created past C++ have added very little innovation, its just "my own vanilla flavor" (yet it is still vanilla) some, very few indeed, have added valuable syntactic sugar, yet how I wish new languages stopped being created pretending to excel at a corner case that gives you "huge benefits" (which of course are all thrown to waste when you realize most of your application cycles and latency actually comes from other places rather than such corner case.

This is not an argument for "new* languages are bad" , rather one of "until trully needed reinvent the wheel" and I think that will happen when we finally get to use qbits and new paradigms of coding/logic arise (basically an architecture change)

[JonChesterfield]

There are loads of libraries for lua. You can either get them from luarocks in modern fashion or as more ad hoc source code in the old school. They're either written in C, against a stable language API, or in lua. Or a mix, doesn't make much difference. Also you can splice them directly into lua itself, e.g. the interpreter I use has libuv and sqlite built in.

The argument against shipping everything with the language is that the standard library is where code goes to die. Once shipped, fear of breaking users tends to block all progress. See mature languages like python and c++.

And regarding lack of innovation, lua has coroutines in the base language. Real ones that don't need co_await written near them. It has a module system built on dictionaries. It ships the compiler, so writing source code that you eval on the fly works out of the box.

Lua is spectacularly good. We are blessed to have it available.