Update to lua 5.1?

[bluddy]

It's amazing that this project even exists, but the most relevant version of lua appears to be 5.1. Any chance of supporting it?

[dmbaturin]

Please note that Lua-ML is not a set of bindings for the PUC-Rio Lua (the one available from lua.org), it's an alternative implementation based on very different ideas.

Of course I'd like it to implement modern Lua, but it's a matter of reimplementing those language features rather than "just" replacing the Lua interpreter (though upgrading bindings to newer interpreter versions isn't trivial either, but that's beside the point).

There are also many other reasons to radically rework the internals, in particular, the parser and runtime error reporting.

So yes, eventually I'd like to get there, but it's a lot of work. If you want to help with it, that would be nice.

[jonahbeckford]

There are also many other reasons to radically rework the internals, in particular, the parser and runtime error reporting.

Context: I use fmlib_parse in the projects where I'm embedding Lua. And I had great error reporting. Then I added lua-ml and its error reporting lowers the user experience a lot. There are also some fairly substantial parsing bugs (ex. f()() does not work). But since lua-ml seems to be a proof of concept rather than a user-facing project, perhaps that is expected.

I was planning on vendoring lua-ml going forward since my future additions seem quite far away from the goals of lua-ml:

• major refactoring of its parsing. That is a switch from ocamlyacc/Menhir to fmlib_parse for harmony with the rest of my projects
• I might annotate statically constructed runtime values with location information, since I have some scenarios where I need to programmatically edit Lua config files
• and if I'm replacing the parser, I might as well add in lexical support for Lua 5 (ex. the for keyword)

Anyway, my changes would be breaking changes. The alternative to vendoring is to fork lua-ml with a new major version. I could be persuaded to go either way.

cc: @lindig