Author Topic: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?  (Read 20259 times)

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Offline Hot_Dog

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Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« on: June 05, 2011, 12:08:12 pm »
I heard from someone that Lua on the Nspire is darn close to the speed of C/Asm on the Nspire.  Do you think the community will use Ndless nonetheless, or do you think hacking the Nspire will be a successful, yet unneeded, effort?

Offline Spyro543

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #1 on: June 05, 2011, 12:11:17 pm »
I'm quite fine with Lua alone, we've seen some cool and impressive programs made with Lua, I don't think there will be a need for C/Asm anymore.

Offline Munchor

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #2 on: June 05, 2011, 12:17:26 pm »
I'm quite fine with Lua alone, we've seen some cool and impressive programs made with Lua, I don't think there will be a need for C/Asm anymore.

I disagree, I'd like a GBC Emulator, I'd like lots of stuff that just can't be made with an interpreted language, I'd like to code in C and perhaps ARM, Ndless is needed.

Offline thepenguin77

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #3 on: June 05, 2011, 12:17:42 pm »
Of course I'm not an Nspire dev. But since Lua is sand boxed, I would compare Lua to this situation.

Imagine that TI-Basic suddenly became as fast as asm. (Yeah right) That would mean that you would be able to write basic games that roughly equal the power of asm games. So as far as the game world goes, no, there would be no need for asm.

But now, try to write a shell in TI-Basic. One that can list all the programs on the calculator and execute them at random. You also want your shell to install a hook that allows programs to be run from the homescreen and setup some more hooks just to make the calculator generally easier to use. (Think zStart). Through TI-Basic alone, you cannot write Utility programs, so you must then fall back on asm even though Basic is crazy fast.

So, assuming that Lua is similar to TI-Basic as far as being sand boxed, my analogy should work.
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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #4 on: June 05, 2011, 12:18:57 pm »
I agree with Scout on this one. Lua is pretty awesome, but it doesn't let us do all that stuff we can do with C/ASM. nDOOM, gbc4nspire, and NESpire would never have been possible in Lua, remember.




Offline pianoman

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #5 on: June 05, 2011, 12:19:52 pm »
Agreed. Getting Ndless might cause TI to block that and Lua too.

Offline Munchor

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #6 on: June 05, 2011, 12:20:37 pm »
I also have to remind that Lua doesn't allow fullscreen, stuff have to be inside documents, and that's a huge advantage of C and ASM for me.

Agreed. Getting Ndless might cause TI to block that and Lua too.

"Agreed" on what? Please tell us who you are referring to.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2011, 12:22:29 pm by Scout »

Offline ruler501

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #7 on: June 05, 2011, 12:23:00 pm »
You have to have C/Asm for this. Eventually we will hack it on.
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Offline Spyro543

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #8 on: June 05, 2011, 12:25:41 pm »
"Hack" as in "void the warranty"? I have nothing against these two programming languages, and many of the games so far wouldn't be possible without Ndless, but I'm just fine with Lua.

Offline Hot_Dog

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #9 on: June 05, 2011, 12:27:09 pm »
Ah yes, C/ASM do allow full control

Offline Munchor

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #10 on: June 05, 2011, 12:27:10 pm »
"Hack" as in "void the warranty"? I have nothing against these two programming languages, and many of the games so far wouldn't be possible without Ndless, but I'm just fine with Lua.

He means hack as in unlock the calculator to make it run Assembly programs. Do you have any idea of how Lua is limited when compared to C and ARM? That's why most of us think that Assembly is needed.

Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #11 on: June 05, 2011, 12:28:29 pm »
They can't reasonably block Lua now, the backlash (not just from us hobbyists - also teachers who are currently warming up to the possibilities offered by Lua) would be too high ;)

And no, Lua will never ever erase the need for native code :)
Especially if TI's Lua implementation remains purely interpreted: the LuaJIT performance pages ( http://luajit.org/performance_arm.html , http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html ) show that in some use cases, LuaJIT is more than two orders of magnitude (100 times) faster than regular Lua - and code produced by LuaJIT doesn't execute as fast as the equivalent native code would, so the gap between interpreted Lua and native code is even larger.
Besides performance unmatched by Lua, native code enables deeper (near-full) control over the devices we own, rather than being limited to what TI feels like providing - namely, a stripped-down Lua.

[EDIT: I see that several posts have been posted while I was writing mine :) ]
« Last Edit: June 05, 2011, 12:31:06 pm by Lionel Debroux »
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Offline pianoman

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #12 on: June 05, 2011, 12:28:39 pm »
Whoops, it appears i got triple ninja'd. I was agreeing with Spyro.

Offline Munchor

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #13 on: June 05, 2011, 12:29:57 pm »
Whoops, it appears i got triple ninja'd. I was agreeing with Spyro.

But as Lionel Debrouxl said and correctly, they'll never remove Lua. Do you still not want ARM?

Offline pianoman

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Re: Will Lua erase the need for Ndless?
« Reply #14 on: June 05, 2011, 12:30:57 pm »
Whoops, it appears i got triple ninja'd. I was agreeing with Spyro.

But as Lionel Debrouxl said and correctly, they'll never remove Lua. Do you still not want ARM?
What's ARM?
Please forgive my noobiness. :P
« Last Edit: June 05, 2011, 12:31:14 pm by pianoman »