Wow Claude, last night I rewrote several of my old externals that were originally in C, in Lua last night... And they required about 1/4 of the code that C requires. I am pretty much sold on using Lua now...
I guess one of the things that seemed to scream out at me was "How would Lua and PD work together"? While I know this is a pretty broad and general question, I was wondering, with you as the developer of the Lua stuff, just how do you see Lua fitting in with PD? What sorts of things would be best done in each language? One of the things that I like (if I understand this correctly) about using Lua, as that everything is now accessible programmatically.
I do have a couple of questions...
1. Is it possible to access from Lua, the elements of a table object that is defined in PD?
2. Can data struct's be accessed from Lua?
3. Is it possible to load Lua objects using a path? (ie [my-lua-directory/my-lua-external.lua]) If something written in Lua is supposed to look like other PD externals, then I would think this would work with Lua externals as well.
4. Are there things that you wouldn't do in Lua? For performance reasons? Other reasons?
I guess I am asking these things because I could see it possible that I could rewrite almost everything in Lua, and then passing on the control data to the PD objects to generate the sound. One of the "line of division" that I was thinking about for my own stuff would be to write all the control stuff in Lua, and then feed that data to PD for the audio generation.
Thanks for this work you have done (and to others, as well).
Mike
--
Peace may sound simple—one beautiful word— but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.
—Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999), musician