On 2011-05-06, venom00 wrote: >> >> Lua >> >> + small and fast, >> >> + used in LuaTeX, so it will become more common and known in the >> >> TeX community, >> >> + a Lua interpreter can be embedded in LyX with minimal >> impact on >> >> the binary size.
>> > Wasn't there another thread with the result that LyX is not >> > bloated enough? Actually this was a response to the "allow plug-ins" sub-thread of the "goals for 2.1". The idea was to reduce the memory footprint by a plugin system. >> According to http://www.lua.org/about.html >> The tarball for Lua 5.1.4, which contains source code, >> documentation, >> and examples, takes 212K compressed and 860K uncompressed. >> The source >> contains around 17000 lines of C. Under Linux, the Lua interpreter >> built with all standard Lua libraries takes 153K and the Lua library >> takes 203K. >> Compare this to a minimal Python installation or the size of the LyX >> binary. > We already require Python, that's a point in its favour. If we are talking about external tools, yes. But it is also about requiring vs. embedding. For Python scripting, I have written a PyClient package http://wiki.lyx.org/Tools/PyClient that I would welcome to see adopted. >> The idea is to outsource¹ tasks. This would reduce the binary size and >> memory footprint even more. An example would be the parsing of the >> unicodesymbols file. > Weren't we talking about scripting? However seems hard that making > something in an interpreted language could improve performances > compared with (good) C++. With an embedded Lua interpreter, OTOH the impact on performance will be small for tasks like writing/parsing config files, lyx2lyx, tex2lyx etc. The "intelligence" can be stored in scripts that do not bloat the main binary. Günter
