Re: Tcl vs. Lua

Cameron Laird wrote:
> Lua is tops for "easy integration with C/C++". Tcl is almost
> as simple. Tcl, as it happens, offers at least a half-dozen
> distinct idioms for Tcl-C co-operation. One of these is
> called, "stubs". Lua lacks stubs, to the best of my knowledge
> (although only straightforward if tedious effort lies in the
> way of someone who wants to endow Lua with stubs).

Stubs is in part an attitude to backward compatability that is oriented
to very stable APIs and heavy production use. Actually stubbing an API
isn't very hard; you use automated tools to do most of the maintenance
after all. But keeping those promises you made by adopting a stubbed
API, well, that's a different story altogether.

FWIW, most commercial software is nothing like as stable as Tcl, even if
we restrict ourselves to examining just the API (and leave out things
like propensity to crash, etc.) To see what I mean by this, you have to
realize that code that was compiled to binary form against Tcl 8.1 (i.e.
perhaps as far back as May 1999) will still probably work if loaded into
the CVS HEAD version of 8.5, over six and a half years later. (Of
course, if we talk about source compatability, I've got code that was
written against Tcl 7.4 which still builds now, over a decade later.)

Donal.
Received on Tue Jan 3 03:09:52 2006