I can understand that you did not cover developement enviornments in your book as you want to focus on the non-changing core part of the Lua language. But there are quite a few really nice IDEs available for download at the lua.org site:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAddons
and I am curious about what you think are the best ones to work with. I am especially curious about how well Lua can make GUI apps. Thats one thing I miss about old languages like VB and Delphi were the really nice GUI design tools where you drag out buttons and text fields onto a workspace. Will anything like that every be available for Lua? I notice wxWidgets seems to be favored for use with Lua, what is your preference for making GUI apps in Lua?

Hi Brad,

> But there are quite a few really nice IDEs available for download
> at the lua.org site: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAddons and I am
> curious about what you think are the best ones to work with.

This would be a great discussion topic for the general Lua mailing
list (see http://www.lua.org/lua-l.html). It would be interesting
to learn what development environments people are using and what
their respective advantages are. For my part as a committed command
line developer, I'm unfortunately rather ignorant of them.

> I am especially curious about how well Lua can make GUI apps.

Lua is perfect for developing graphical user interface applications
-- you can separate the low-level interface code written in C or
C++ from the high-level code written in Lua. The wxWidgets library
seems especially finished and comprehensive, although I have only
examined it briefly. If you're developing for the Win32 platform,
you might want to investigate the VCL Lua project. It is currently
a little rough, but it makes use of Borland's excellent visual
component library.

I'm not that familiar with the Lua libraries that are out there,
but I have a feeling that if I was to work with one, I would wind
up writing a layer in Lua that would facilitate using it from the
application level. In particular, it would use Lua coroutines to
manage events.

> Thats one thing I miss about old languages like VB and Delphi
> were the really nice GUI design tools where you drag out buttons
> and text fields onto a workspace. Will anything like that every
> be available for Lua?

Here again, the folks on the Lua mailing list will have many more
answers than I do. My experience with building GUI applications is
using a Lua binding that places all controls on a form at runtime.
The placement is done by specifying how the controls are grouped,
kind of like the XUL box model
(http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/boxes.html).

--
Kurt

Thanks for the response Kurt. I just want to mention that I have asked this question in the #Lua IRC channel, a bunch of very sharp individuals frequent that channel. But like anything, everyone has there own opinion on what is best. So I thought since you wrote a book that takes an objective overview of the language, that you might have something to include about IDEs that you couldnt include in the book. But as it turns out, that is not something youve delved into. But thanks for the info you have provided, I will be very curious to check out the toolkit that uses Borlands librarys.