Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources (opens in new tab)

Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list is to provide an overview of what's out there.

As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be reconsidered.

I disagree strongly with that.

Penlight is the closest thing there is to a Lua standard library (loosely modeled after what exists in Python). It is maintained by Steve Donovan who is one of the most active members of the community and the author of http://www.luafaq.org/, LDoc and lake.

Having contributed to Penlight myself I can say it is certainly not poorly maintained compared to most other Lua projects.

I agree, Penlight is not the best at everything it does, and it probably does too much (which is why there is microlight), but it is still a tool most Lua users need to know about.

Why do you say that? WRT doco it's one of the better Lua libraries.

Are there alternatives to penlight you'd recommend?

For what it's worth, I wrote https://lua-toolbox.com/ (a website referencing all Lua rocks which users can endorse).

A search engine will allow you to discover tools you are looking for, but sometimes you do not know exactly what to search. There are way fewer Lua modules than e.g. Python or Ruby libraries so exhaustive lists are still manageable.

Also, sometimes you want to know what people are actually using. A bit of "social proof" is always good when you are looking for Open Source libraries.

There is more to say about this and the Lua modules ecosystem, which is why I gave an entire talk about that topic at Lua Workshop last year http://files.catwell.info/presentations/2013-11-lua-workshop... :)

A search engine is technically sufficient, but takes more time and is less accessible. A search engine won't put things in front of you for you to peruse and explore; you have to know what you're looking for. Beyond that, the contributors and I have done research to find and decide on the entries on this list, which should help readers avoid repeating the same process.

A git repo has an explicitly responsible maintainer, while wikipedia articles do not. This helps keep the quality high.

Regarding SEO - even now, the same day I first pushed this, searching 'lua awesome' returns this as result #5 on Google. 'awesome-<language>' is a known convention for curated lists like this one, and people familiar with that convention who are looking for Lua resources will easily find this.

Maybe the way to judge curation is by comparing curation+search to search alone. With good curation effort, i think that curation+search is a winner , at a relatively minor cost(needing more time).

Also curation has the benefit of being a useful discovery tool.

This is a totally valid point which I considered, but I think the association of awesome-<language> for lists like this is more valuable, since part of the purpose is to make it accessible for people outside the lua world (who probably won't know about awesomeWM anyway).

Awesome would be "lua-configured", not "lua-based".

Hm, they work fine for me; can you be more specific?

Indeed; I have no claim to originality. The pre-existing list is (extremely) incomplete, and gives a laundry list of outdated and unmaintained libraries which are often not useful or broadly relevant. Such entries dilute the usefulness of all other entries on the list, so I made this version to avoid that (and to be more complete).

The only thing I came across (not my area) was this http://worp.zevv.nl/