Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nikolay 933 days ago
A. It's true that Wasmer is bigger, but even my phone has 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage space.

B. There are probably more computers running WebAssembly loads today than Lisp ones.

C. Lisp is a mature language, almost too mature. I used it extensively in the '80s and it served me well then, but that was 40 years ago. At least have the decency to use a more modern language like Lua, which is what Neovim uses.
2 comments
klibertp 932 days ago
Lua is very weak for "programming in the large". It's just a little bit better than early JavaScript. Scripts are OK, but anything that requires more code with more structure requires incredible amounts of perseverance and discipline from all contributors. You can do fairly large programs in Lua as a small team of highly skilled hackers, but the barrier to entry will be much higher than if you did it in a language that offers ready-made abstractions.

I use AwesomeWM, which is basically Emacs of Window Managers, with Lua instead of Elisp. The code is very well written and documented, yet getting into it is much more complicated than if it was written in Python - even if that Python was written poorly.

link
bobbyskelton41 933 days ago
A. Sure, but it isn't sufficiently beneficial for the cost.

B. WebAssembly is immature for developing a plugin system because of the lack of a sufficient ABI: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

C. There aren't any other languages that meet the criteria. Lua was a no-go from the start. The maintainers did not like the language, and it necessitated adding more C code to Helix which could complicate building even further. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/3806#discu...

link
nikolay 932 days ago
A Lisp, a weird dialect of Lisp, is not better than Lua. Why use Rune [0]?!

[0]: https://rune-rs.github.io/

link
bobbyskelton41 930 days ago
Rune is not mature and is developed by a handful of people. Please check the thread I linked, literally everything you could say has already been addressed.

Saying "X is better than Y" or "Why not Z?" is not constructive at all.

link
nikolay 925 days ago
It is constructive, though - Lisp used to be fun when parsing complex language grammar was not as trivial as it is today. I loved it, and I worked with muLisp for many years... in the '80s and '90s. For AI (or, rather, "expert systems"), it was without a match... prior to the '80s, though. There were Lisp machines even... in the past.
link