I was lurking in their mailing list for some time and they push back a lot, I’d even say they managed to create a culture of no-feature. Whether it was good or bad idk, because (as expected) some proposals sounded good to me, some so so. What makes Lua unpopular imo, beyond subjective trivialities, is that they break compatibility in every version and in fact they release flavors of the same core idea vs updates of a language. Also it is technical and not user-friendly for windows users, because luarocks (package manager) is unusable there unless you’re skilled in C build systems and are ready to fix these issues. I lost track of it at 5.3.
I think Lua would feel much better if it stopped at 5.2 (or even at 5.1, fixing the shortcomings in 5.1 way) and took care of what’s called ecosystem, emerging around its game popularity.
> Also it is technical and not user-friendly for windows users, because luarocks (package manager) is unusable there unless you’re skilled in C build systems and are ready to fix these issues.
I've found using hererocks[1] makes setting up lua and luarocks on Windows very easy. Running it in visual studio's command prompt has let me install pure Lua and C rocks.
However, I've noticed many rocks aren't updated on luarocks and the best way to install them is to point luarocks to the rockspec file in their git repo. Instead of `luarocks install testy` you do something like `luarocks install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/siffiejoe/lua-testy/master...` I don't use Lua for desktop development, so I only use rocks for dev tools to help write Lua for my embedded target, so I'm not sure how popular luarocks is these days.
Tinkering with ways to do arrays, iteration, function environments, coroutines. Some ways are improvements, some may be seen as an improvement, some are just different.
I think Lua would feel much better if it stopped at 5.2 (or even at 5.1, fixing the shortcomings in 5.1 way) and took care of what’s called ecosystem, emerging around its game popularity.