[CMake] CMake and Lua

[Brandon Van Every]

Hopefully other people will spend time debating the merits / demerits
of this, as people have gotten sick of hearing me talk about CMake and
Lua as of late.  I'm happy that my irritance has caused people to
continue to discuss the possibilities, however.  I will make one
point:

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 6:20 AM, Peter Kümmel <syntheticpp at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>  If only this is done, nothing is won. But with this layout,
>  it would be much easer to use other scripting languages.
>  With this architecture you don't have to definitely exclude all
>  other scripting languages when choosing Lua as additional new
>  language.

I am not seeing the merit of trying to support multiple scripting
languages.  This fragments CMake into many sub-language communities.
Who would handle all the inevitable bugs?  It's many times the work of
maintaining a quality implementation with 1 scripting language.  It
wouldn't get handled, so CMake's reputation would suffer "because the
Python implementation isn't so good" or whatever.  How do I advise
someone who's using a different language?  I can't just show them
working code, I can't just tell them to file a bug report with a
trivial reproducer.  I have to understand their language, or tell them
how to "abstractly" solve the problem, or just punt.  Not all
scripting languages have nice licenses.  For instance, Ruby has a
somewhat onerous Artistic License, compared to CMake's BSD license.
Most of the languages other than Lua are somewhat bloated, both in
terms of execution size and speed.

In short, I do not see value in trying to be all things to all people.
 That's an expensive way to do business.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every