Let me share Tim's thoughts he sent me via a chat about coding externals in lua, which I think are a perfect sell. Compared to C externals, lua externals:

Encourages open-source, since the source code is the object
Works on every OS, architecture, pd floatsize, multi-instance, all without needing recompilation
You can easily modify objects if you want to
GUIs are now much easier to write with Lua than with C
Are guaranteed to keep working even if Pd's C API changes, or Pd changes GUI framework
Are guaranteed to work across Pd forks, as long as they correctly implement the lua API

Em ter., 1 de out. de 2024 às 15:36, Alexandre <porres@gmail.com> escreveu:

Em seg., 30 de set. de 2024 às 16:59, Christof Ressi <info@christofressi.com> escreveu:
Thanks to Antoine for mentioning pdlua! I will need to check it out. I have already seen people doing some very cool stuff with it. Maybe they already have the perfect solution :)

I'm also looking at pdlua, which might want to become the official way to make graphical externs AND to add scripting in a fundamental way to Pd :)

+1 for an official scripting language! :) (I love Lua, BTW.) And yes, it would make lots of sense to leverage the scripting language to implement custom UIs!

+1k

Yay, great to hear that! BTW, I remembered about this ticket we opened years ago inquiring about adding lua to Pd natively! https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/issues/687

Now that Tim is doing great work for graphics, this would be even more awesome! And I wouldn't have to worry in shipping it in ELSE for some externals that already use it :)

cheers