Space Lua: Making Space Script safer, simpler and unifying all the things

[Offray]

Thanks a lot for this thread, as I'm enjoying digging into SB's history and I found this thread today when I retook a conversation with a peer from the Malleable Systems community about Fengari and I was looking if it was already considered in relation with Space Lua. And yes, it was, despite I don't have the proper background to understand (Dr ;-P) @zef's initial stopper with already existing Lua in the web, implementations when he said:

@zef

There’s a big caveat with the Lua implementations that exist today, and that is that to allow Lua code to call asynchronous APIs (e.g. any syscall), you’d have to write Lua code with callbacks, which would become quite ugly. I already have a solution to work around this for SB’s expression language (where you can mix synchronous and async calls transparently), and I think I can expand that to a full Lua implementation.

But, of course, I trust his judgement, as Space Lua proves to be another successful Lua extension story within the particular historic constrains of SB.

Which brings me to @Maarrk remarks regarding:

@Maarrk

I think that there’s a bit of an uncomfortable choice between:

• backward compatibility with SilverBullet
• full compatibility with Lua
• partial compatibility with both, so neither fully

as I'm facing questions on full compatibility with Lua to see if I can make SB backward compatible with Cardumem, the Lua based static site generator, I'm creating to support our previous/current documentation/publishing workflows, while dealing with Markdown's popularity and insufficiency and its several "variants in the wild", mainly Pandoc's, HedgeDoc's, Lunamark's and now SB's, that deal with the format limitations in distinct ways.

Specifically, I would like to reuse the lessons I learnt[*] while supporting Markdown customizations using Lua Parser Expression Grammars (LPEG) and move them from Lunamark to SilverBullet. But, because of non-full compatibility with Lua, that seem not possible so far. So, I'm thinking in the the opposite approach, that has been successful so far: support (parts of) SilverBullet syntax in Cardumem (starting with transclusions and title links), given that there I have full Lua support and keep exploring the complementary relation between (dynamic) SB and (static) Cardumem. @Maarrk question on how SB could read a folder of Lua scripts was also on my radar, as adding Cardumem to an already existing Markdown documentation project is essentially adding the Lua scripts that make it work (via downloads and Luarocks).

I'll keep you posted as I advance my exploration on how to make SB part of a pre-existing workflow of Markdown/Lua powered documentation/publishing workflows.

Thanks again for this rich story and the public record/reflection on SB design and its community usage/tensions.

Cheers,

== Note(s)

[*] I'm learning Lua with Cardumem and (very) slowly LPEGs too. My sense of resonance between Cardumem and SB is increased in the fact that this thread on supporting Lua as its extension language ended just weeks before my first commit on Cardumem and I wouldn't have rediscovered SB, if Lua hadn't become its extension language... ahh the power of serendipity.