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dividuum a day ago

Not true. It's getting a constant stream of bugfixes. It's also not "stuck" on Lua 5.1, but is deliberately not following Lua's path, except for some backports. There's also a recent post about how a LuaJIT 3 might work.

fithisux 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where is that post?

fweimer 16 hours ago | parent [-]

https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Question-about-LuaJIT-...

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loulouxiv 12 hours ago | parent [-]

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shmerl a day ago | parent | prev [-]

OK, then I got some wrong info. If it's stuck at it deliberately, then it's worse. May be someone should fork it and bring it up to date with recent Lua versions. Why is this split needed?

upofadown a day ago | parent | next [-]

My understanding is that there was a language fork after 5.1. One thing was a complete reworking of how math works. It used to be just floating point for everything but the new idea was to make it like Python 3. So most operations are float/integer with some weird exceptions.

As with any language fork there will be some who stay and others who switch to the new thing. Often a fork will drive people away from a particular language as in my case.

ksymph a day ago | parent | next [-]

Lua's nature as a primarily embedded language means backwards compatibility is not guaranteed between any version. If 5.2 was a language fork then so was 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, etc. (5.2 did have some more significant changes though)

For that reason luajit staying at ~5.1 actually works in its favor. Rather than trying to follow the moving target of the newest version, it gives a robust focal point for the lua ecosystem, while modern versions can be developed and continue to serve their purpose in embedded systems and whatnot where appropriate.

shmerl a day ago | parent [-]

I don't see a reason not to update LuaJIT still. Changes in Lua aren't just version numbers, it should be improving something, meaning that would be missing in LuaJIT.

radiator 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't it a bit naive to declare that, just because Lua created a new minor version, it should be somehow better? The author of LuaJIT has often written his arguments, including why he disagrees with the changes to the language, why they should have been implemented as libraries instead, that in his view LuaJIT is still more performant and more widely used than PUC Lua, and more.

As for forking, you can try, but I would warn you that one does not simply fork LuaJIT. Required is deep expertise in tracing JIT compilers, in assembly and in many different computer architectures. Nobody was really up to the task when Mike Pall announced that he was searching for a maintainer, before his eventual return.

ksymph a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LuaJIT does have some backported features from newer versions. But Mike Pall -- the mad genius behind LuaJIT -- has made it clear he doesn't agree with many of the changes made in newer versions, hence why it's staying where it's at.

electroglyph a day ago | parent | prev [-]

the beauty of open source is there's nothing stopping you! this might be your calling. best of luck

shmerl a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Language fork is unfortunate. Python situation isn't much of a fork really. Python 2 is basically EOL.

kstrauser a day ago | parent [-]

There’s no “basically”. Stick a fork in it; it’s done: https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/

shakna a day ago | parent | next [-]

It might not be supported by the consortium, but python2 still lives, slowly, in one place or another:

> The RHEL 8 AppStream Lifecycle Page puts the end date of RHEL 8's Python 2.7 package at June 2024.

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511

At this point in RHEL it is only "deprecated", not "obsolete".

wombatpm 20 hours ago | parent [-]

In RHEL I would never touch system python at all, and would install what every version I needed in a venv and configure any software I installed to use what ever version I needed. I learned the hard way to never mess with system python.

shmerl a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Which is better than this mess with Lua situation.

ux266478 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The language is different. The changes to environments in particular are a non-starter. Sandboxing is incredibly clunky in 5.2+, and we lost a lot of metaprogramming power and dynamic behavior.

ori_b a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> May be someone should fork it and bring it up to date with recent Lua versions. Why is this split needed?

Good news, you're someone. If you care, you're welcome to go for it.

krapp 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I strenuously disagree. Not every language needs to chase trends and pile on unnecessary complexity because developers want the latest shiny language toys to play with. It's good to have a simple, stable language that works and that you can depend on to remain sane for the forseeable future.

C is a language like that but I fear the feature creep is coming (auto? AUTO??.) JS is a lost cause.