[marklgr]

> But we should look at what Lua did for Neovim. There has been an explosion of development effort now that Neovim finally added a reasonable programming interface.

It is very much debatable whether Lua is the "reasonable programming interface" causing the activity in Neovim. Vimscript has many flaws, one of them being that it doesn't look like other programming languages, but it does its specialized job pretty well. It is slow, but efforts are made in that area. Lua is well designed but it certainly has its shortcomings too, and many argue (me included) that programming in Lua is not that pleasant. The Lua bindings have been available in Vim for quite some time, but they never were popular, for some reasons.

Anyway, it is not directly related to your point, but I think that example is not that compelling.

[giraffe_lady]

Lua is a really good lure. You add it to a project and a bunch of people go "oh neat, I've heard a lot of good things about lua, I'll do this idea I've had in lua."

And then the realities of working in lua accrete over months, but then they're in too deep. What are they gonna do, learn elisp? Admit defeat and switch back to VS code?

[klibertp]

> What are they gonna do

Personally, I'm using Haxe with its Lua backend. While wrapping Lua APIs is a pain, and some dynamic patterns are hard to represent directly, Haxe provides a lot of the things that Lua lacks: a gradual static type system, more familiar JS-based syntax, syntactic sugar for lambdas, sane handling of `this` in methods, control over inlining, immutable variables, generics, null safety, powerful hygienic macros, somewhat usable standard library, extension functions (Kotlin/Scala3 like), partial function application, hash and array comprehensions, functional operators on collections, limited operator overloading via abstracts, built-in LSP server, and a lot more.

I do this in the context of scripting my window manager, and plan to try this with Nginx/OpenRESTY. I feel like pairing LuaJIT runtime with Haxe compilation creates incredibly powerful combination. Lua provides coroutines, tail call elimination including corecursive functions, lightweight and fast JITed VM, a package manager (luarocks), bindings to important C libraries, FFI, reflection (everything is a table anyway), and more. The integration between Haxe and Lua is not yet seamless, and Lua compiler backend is one of the least developed, but even in this state I'm very happy with the combination of compile-time and run-time features I get.

[giraffe_lady]

Ha interesting, I didn't really expect a serious answer but very cool. I looked into haxe a while back when I was gearing up for a significantly complex project targeting lua 5.1.

I ended not using it mostly because of unfamiliarity and it felt like it would add a fair bit of complexity. Didn't want to pick up a whole new ecosystem for that project.

I ended up using fennel, which solves most of my practical problems with lua without really making anything harder. Doesn't help with the package ecosystem or build process but I ended up just taking that compromise.

Don't regret it, still use fennel anywhere I'm forced to use lua, including hammerspoon and mud client scripting. I think if I was going to work heavily in lua long-term I'd go back and invest in haxe for it.