[catwell]

> The interesting thing about the Lua community is that very few people use Lua as their primary day-in-day-out language, which leads to a distinct lack of fanboyism. I think that's in part why so few libraries exist.

Yes. The fact that LuaRocks is close to its 300th library illustrates that :)

I am one of the few people who use Lua as their main language, but I still turn to something else for things like Web development (Python + Flask). Maybe this will change with the OpenResty + Lapis stack [1], which is IMO the most interesting thing in Lua Web development since Mercury [2].

[1] http://leafo.net/lapis/ [2] https://github.com/nrk/mercury

Lua actually has lot of libraries dedicated to interoperability with other languages in a system (protobuf, ZeroMQ, ...), which makes it usable as part of a SOA, so you can write your web frontends in something else and still have most of your backend in Lua.

[fingerprinter]

I primarily do web stuff, apis etc. I wanted to use Lua for a new project and basically gave up. I looked at OpenResty and Lapis and really, really wanted to use it but it was a pain to get working and pain to keep working. Not sure if it has matured since the last time I looked at it (2-3 months ago), but at the time I couldn't use it without quite a bit of mucking around.

That said, I would still love to use it if it was even close to ready.

[catwell]

It is improving fast these days. If you have used it months ago it was 0.0.1 and now it is 0.0.3. Still, those version numbers should make it clear you should not use it in production for something serious...

OpenResty itself, on the other hand, is perfectly usable and used in production at large websites such as Taobao (the Chinese eBay / Amazon) and CloudFlare.