[Toybox] G'day, and thoughts about lua.

[David Seikel]

G'day.  You might know me from the Aboriginal Linux mailing list.

I know that lua has been considered for toybox, but I don't think
there's been any movement on that.

I've recently been doing major work on the Enlightenment Foundation
Libraries (EFL) lua support.  Turning it from a proof of concept demo
into something actually useful.  I'm using it in a project in
combination with Aboriginal Linux, so I know what the minimal
dependencies are, and other useful experience.  Some of that work might
be useful for toybox.

Basically my work has been implementing more of the EFL API as lua
functions for lua scripters.  Largely that's boilerplate code to wrap
existing C functions.  So I spent a lot of time factoring out the
boilerplate to make it all a lot easier and smaller.

For what it's worth, the EFL lua stuff is BSD licensed, and lua itself
is MIT licensed.  Should be no problem with those.

This is using C hosted lua embedded in EFL apps as a sandboxed internal
scripting language, the way lua was meant to be used.  Toybox does not
need the sandbox, as parts of it pretty much HAS to dig deep into the
guts of the OS.  "sudo rm -fr /" implemented in lua has to work, even if
it's a silly idea.

So I would think that lua in toybox would be similar, but without the
sandboxing.  The existing toybox C code, with lua embedded in it, lua
API wrapped around useful common infrastructure, plus start to write new
stuff in lua where it makes sense.   If that's the way you want it,
then I'd be happy to bring the relevant bits of my current lua work to
toybox.  Even if it's just an experiment to see if it's worthwhile.

What do you think?

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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