- the stack-based API makes it reasonably easy not to goof with references and introduce hard-to-find GC bugs.
- reference-counting simplifies some stuff, but introduce other bug classes (e.g. circular references). Moreover, ref-counting GCs are generally outperformed by mark & sweep GCs (because most objects have a very short lifespan with dynamic languages).
- to create mutual references between userdata, you have to use the stack. It's cumbersome but it ensures that the GC state is always consistent. The choice is between cumbersome, buggy user code, and buggy GC code.
- lack of paradigms (or "officially preferred way to do things", as magistrally done by the Python community), is indeed annoying. It would be a fatal flaw in a general purpose language. In a language intended to be embedded, it is merely a debatable choice, although one I don't support. The language's purpose is limited to provide basic building blocks, APIs and paradigms are to be provided by the embedding application. I wished preferred paradigms were strongly suggested, too.
It would be possible to define a very elegant and productive programming ecosystem around Lua; one which would probably be marginally better than Python or Ruby at many tasks. But I'm not convinced that the improvements would be dramatic enough to let that Lua++ carve its own niche between the established generalist, stand-alone languages. Better stay the best language to embed with C IMO.
- reference-counting simplifies some stuff, but introduce other bug classes (e.g. circular references). Moreover, ref-counting GCs are generally outperformed by mark & sweep GCs (because most objects have a very short lifespan with dynamic languages).
- to create mutual references between userdata, you have to use the stack. It's cumbersome but it ensures that the GC state is always consistent. The choice is between cumbersome, buggy user code, and buggy GC code.
- lack of paradigms (or "officially preferred way to do things", as magistrally done by the Python community), is indeed annoying. It would be a fatal flaw in a general purpose language. In a language intended to be embedded, it is merely a debatable choice, although one I don't support. The language's purpose is limited to provide basic building blocks, APIs and paradigms are to be provided by the embedding application. I wished preferred paradigms were strongly suggested, too.
It would be possible to define a very elegant and productive programming ecosystem around Lua; one which would probably be marginally better than Python or Ruby at many tasks. But I'm not convinced that the improvements would be dramatic enough to let that Lua++ carve its own niche between the established generalist, stand-alone languages. Better stay the best language to embed with C IMO.