Hello, Lua. (Apple opens door to interpreters on iOS devices) (opens in new tab)

The title and blurb is misleading.

You need permission from Apple on an application by application basis. Interpreted code is to be used in a "minor way" for "minor features". Thus, writing an entire iOS app in an interpreted language (such as Lua) does not seem likely to be allowed.

I'm not a lawyer though. Of course, Apple is fickle and contradicts itself often. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find Titanium gets free reign and Corona does not, or vice versa.

Question: How do you go about getting "written permission from Apple"? What's the standard way of doing this (is there one)?

I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

Interesting. I'm surprised this change hasn't been covered at all by the tech press.

So does this 100% clear the way to use tools like Unity or Appcelerator? I'm particularly interested in Appcelerator (starting a droid/iPhone app in a few weeks) and there isn't a clear statement on their website about this change.

Update: I've emailed appcelarator about this change and requested clarification; I'll update again when I hear back.

Update 2: still no word from Appcelerator. I've spent some time digging through their forums and I think they just don't know what's going on either. It seems like they are just waiting to see what happens today when people start to submit iOS 4 Apps. I guess we'll know the answer becaus of this either way, hopefully soon.

IMHO this doesn't help at all. The core issue is that I can't make an app that runs on multiple platforms. I know that cross platform is against Apple's best interest, but I just don't care. I won't be writing Apple applications.

This is crap, the changed condition is still unacceptable. These conditions are a deal-breaker for me. I would have considered buying an iPhone and developing on it, but because of this stupid other-language-prohibition, I will never buy an Apple product. I bought a Nokia N900 (Maemo / Debian / GNU / Linux phone). I'm very happy being able to run anything on it without having to jail-break or break license terms. Also it runs at up to 1.15Ghz, which is faster than the iPad and newest iPhone.

So nowhere explicitly is lua enumerated in the quote from apple. Is there any particular reason why the posted write up references lua as opposed to i dont know perl or erlang? Are there historical reasons for its preference, as the wiki on lua lists in its use in games?

It's nice to see that Apple is starting to warm up to the idea of giving "express written consent" to apps doing things that might be considered to run afoul.

If that got implemented on a larger scale, the concerns of developers who say "I don't want to develop an app, then get it rejected with no warning" could be alleviated.

A step in a more moderate direction benefits everyone.

This might sound like big news but nothing has changed really. Apple has always accepted for example games that use Python or Lua invisbly as part of their engine.

Will Unity be allowed to include mono's .NET runtime as their scripting host then? There's little practical difference between that and a game scripted with Lua.

Hmm, so Gambit/Chicken Scheme are now fine again if you use them as interpreters, but beware of compiling the Scheme code down to C. This is bizzarro land - the interpreter will use more CPU time and therefore more battery power, one of the reasons Flash isn't included.

Correct me if I'm wrong. But this refers only to unsupported interpreted code right? Ruby for example, is OK according to this section?

Does this mean that I can finally fulfill my dream of porting my WOW add-ons to the iPhone?

Well, RJDJ/Trippy is an app that I've had on my iPhone for years (2?) now, and it includes the Puredata language interpreter, so I don't see how this is new news .. surely there have been exceptions to the Interpreter rule, just that people may not have noticed them ..