The Lua community needs to learn to move on - hisham.hm
https://hisham.hm/2026/08/04/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://hisham.hm/2026/08/04/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
13 replies
Longtime support (LTS) exists for a reason in the tech industry. Maybe provide an LTS.
So I haven’t worked with Lua myself, but is that right? There are forward-incompatibilities in minor versions…? Because that honestly seems pretty fucking stupid. Making basically every version include breaking changes and refusing to follow semantic versioning standards that are designed to essentially account for that is pants-on-head stupid.
Seems like it would be a bit hard to follow a versioning scheme that it predates by almost 20 years. Lua 5.2 even predates semver 1.0.0.
Before semver there was basically no standardization in versioning schemes and the meaning that semver applied to version numbers basically didn't exist (at least in my experience) before it came around. Everyone just kinda had their own meaning for what version numbers meant.
semantic versioning wasn't a new concept when semver 1.0.0 was released. Before that lot of projects already followed this scheme and this was just made official so that everyone should follow it as the standard. So its kind of like if all web browsers support non standard features, and then the committee decides to add it to the standard to make it official. My point is, that the release of semver 1.0.0 isn't the invention of it.
Ok that’s actually an excellent point that I hadn’t accounted for lol
from https://www.lua.org/versions.html:
I like how there's no description of what a "series" is.
There doesn't really need to be as they've stuck to the same series for decades now.
Are there migration path for projects embedding a LUA version? Or is LUA incompatible between version?
Like if I build a plugin for a project in LUA 5.1, and the project want to migrate to 5.5, are there forward incompatibilities? Are there API deprecated for long enough to let people migrate?
As an observer I don't understand why "once you choose a version for your project and a plugin ecosystem develop on it, you are married to this version".
It's Lua, not LUA. It's Portuguese for moon, not an initialism.
You can't migrate once you've got a plugin ecosystem because you're not the maintainer of all third-party plugins, and the maintainers might have lost interest or died and used a licence that doesn't let anyone else take over.
To support your point in stylizing the name: https://www.lua.org/about.html
I wonder why people do this. Happens a lot with Java too.
I've not seen it so much with Java, but for Lua, it's not an English word, and most things in software are either English words or acronyms/initialisms, so it's usually a safe heuristic to assume anything that isn't an English word should be capitalised.