Why I Dabble In Lua

From time to time, people ask my what my motivation is to maintain the various lua-* modules on github (lua-yajl, lua-ev, lua-zlib, and lua-archive at the moment). However, before I answer that question, let me give a little bit of history.

Back in 2008 I was reading Josh Haberman's blog about brilliant programmers. One of the highlighted programmers was Mike Pall and the work he has done to improve Lua's performance by providing a JIT compiler for Lua. I also noticed that Josh was testing Gazelle with Lua, so I started to dabble a little.

One of the things that I liked the most about Lua was the C API. At that time I was also really interested in libev, so I decided to make lua-ev (at that time I was calling it evlua). This task proved to be a lot harder than I expected since I needed a way to callback to lua from an arbitrary C callback, and I really wanted to be sure that everything worked correctly with the garbage collector.

After this first experience, I started thinking of other uses for Lua which got me started in writing lua-zlib and lua-archive. In particular, I was thinking that Lua would be an awesome platform for solving the "deployment problem". In particular, I wanted to use lua to make it easy to run remote commands to install software, something similar to apt-get.

Another place where I think Lua would be awesome is to create a "content aggregater" and template rendering system. I'll describe this more in another post.

So, in conclusion, I don't have a lot of motivation to maintain the lua-* modules. It is just something that I do for fun. It is also my first attempt at trying to do open source... I just still need to figure out how to monetize on open source if I ever want it to be a full time job.