On Fri, 2014-12-05 at 21:27 -0800, Isaac Dunham wrote:

> I haven't tried Lua myself, but it looks fairly easy to learn, is widely
> portable, is used for system tools (with bindings available for openrc
> and systemd), and doesn't use much by way of system resources.
> The garbage collector can be stopped and started explicitly.

I'd also point out that lua isn't just lite, it is small enough that
openwrt can put the thing into router environments which only have 4MB
of flash total, kernel, userspace and all. Embedded is something worth
keeping in mind, even if these days embedded usually means something at
least as capable as a Pi. Still not as small as shell since everything
that claims any relation to UNIX must already have that, but pretty
darned small.

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1665952 Oct 30 09:59 /lib64/libperl.so.5.18.4
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1800480 Nov 3 08:27 /lib64/libpython2.7.so.1.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 216352 Oct 23 2013 /lib64/liblua-5.2.so

Those are of course 64 bit binaries but the lua in my router is actually
about the same at 204KB