PL/Lua (was: plpython implementation)

Hi all,

Claudio Freire wrote:

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 2:29 AM, james <james@mansionfamily.plus.com> wrote:

On 01/07/2013 02:43, Claudio Freire wrote:

In essence, you'd have to use another implementation. CPython guys
have left it very clear they don't intend to "fix" that, as they don't
consider it a bug. It's just how it is.

Given how useful it is to have a scripting language that can be used outside
of the database as well as inside it, would it be reasonable to consider
'promoting' pllua?

My understanding is that it (lua) is much cleaner under the hood (than
CPython).
Although I do recognise that Python as a whole has always had more traction.

Well, that, or you can use another implementation. There are many, and
PyPy should be seriously considered given its JIT and how much faster
it is for raw computation power, which is what a DB is most likely
going to care about. I bet PyPy's sandboxing is a lot better as well.

<snip>

I think that 'promoting' PL/Lua would be too early, but it'd be a great
addition. The latest version, for instance, can run LuaJIT which has a FFI
(check the example in "Anonymous Blocks" at PL/Lua's docs.) I think there are
two main problems: finding maintainers in the core, and lack of popularity to
warrant its promotion (the two problems are related, of course.)

Peter Eisentraut wrote:

On 7/1/13 1:29 AM, james wrote:

Given how useful it is to have a scripting language that can be used
outside
of the database as well as inside it, would it be reasonable to consider
'promoting' pllua?

You can start promoting pllua by making it work with current PostgreSQL
versions. It hasn't been updated in 5 years, and doesn't build cleanly
last I checked.

Having a well-maintained and fully featured pllua available would surely
be welcome by many.

Thanks for the feedback. Actually, PL/Lua's latest version (1.0) was out one
month ago,

http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000314

but the previous version took around 4 years. I was waiting for bug reports,
since I deemed PL/Lua to be fairly featured, but I have now declared it
"stable".

The project is maintained -- I don't know how to say when something is
well-maintained, but small frequency of code updates is not one of my
criteria; Lua, for instance, took six years between versions 5.2 and 5.1.
BTW, just out of curiosity, when was the last time PL/Tcl was updated?

I think that the project is also fully featured, but I'd appreciate any
comments on the contrary (that is, feature requests.) I might be mistaken, but
PL/Lua has all the features that PL/Python, PL/Perl, and PL/Tcl have, but, for
example, features a trusted flavor when PL/Python does not, and has proper
type mappings, which PL/Perl does not (everything is translated to text.)

PL/Lua 1.0 adds anonymous blocks and a TRUNCATE trigger, and it should run on
PostgreSQL 9.2. It can be used with Lua 5.1, 5.2, and LuaJIT 2.0 (if you want
speed and an easy C interface through a FFI, you should try LuaJIT!)

I'd like to take this opportunity to kindly ask the PostgreSQL doc maintainers
to include PL/Lua in the table at Appendix H.3:

Name: PL/Lua
Language: Lua
Website: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllua/

Cheers,
Luis

--
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso

--
Luis Carvalho (Kozure)
lua -e 'print((("lexcarvalho@NO.gmail.SPAM.com"):gsub("(%u+%.)","")))'

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