What are some great but little known libraries for Lua?

Question

A common statement said regarding Lua is that it doesn't come with batteries included; meaning that it lacks a lot of extra libraries.

I think there are a lot of Lua libraries out there and more are being developed all the time, but it is likely people don't know about many of them since the Lua community in general is very pragmatic about getting work done and doesn't waste a lot of time with self promotion.

So what are some great Lua libraries that more people ought to know about?

Note that instead of pointing to http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAddonsArchive (which lists libraries not working in current version of Lua), you could point the link to http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAddons , especially to http://lua-users.org/wiki/LibrariesAndBindings — Michal Kottman, Dec 11 '10 at 23:35

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 11 '10 at 00:25

8

Shameless self-promotion plug: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/

I hope you find something that's useful there.

answered Dec 11 '10 at 00:25

lhf

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 10 '10 at 23:28

My personal favorites are:

LuaSocket, a socket library enabling the use of internet with Lua
The Kepler suite a set of libraries for web application development in Lua.
LuaSQL and LuaSQLite for toying with DB stuff.

All this apart (or not as matter a fact) I highly recommend murgaLua for a batteries-included-but-not-bloated Lua distribution. It's crossplatform, and packs (non exhaustive list):

a binding to FLTK for developing GUI applications
LuaSQLite for sql stuff
LuaSocket
Basic encyption with slncrypt (blowfish, sha1, ...)
Decent RNG
And since the last beta release even a binding to FANN
Audio via ProteAudio
FFI via alien
...

And this whole beast packs in a measly 782kB executable.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 10 '10 at 23:36

I do not think there is the lack of "self promotion" , Lua is one of the best "glue" languages out there (if not the best), therefore allot of the code written for Lua is application specific.

For example, I´ve written a pretty extensive (networking) utility library for Lua and a pretty decent IDE, but its product specific and wont be released for general use.

http://www.intellipool.se/idedoc/

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What are some great but little known libraries for Lua?

3 Answers3