stetre
commented
2 years ago It sure makes sense but it's an endeavour I honestly shy away from, for various reasons.
I have nothing against others attempting to do it, though.
On my part, I strive to keep the build systems minimal and easily replaceable and to introduce as few dependencies as possible (even among the libraries of the collection), so not to hinder any effort in that and other directions (packaging, inclusion in other projects, or whatever).
Perhaps the main things I am noticing that there is only one major issue with are the fact that none of these builds have compiled releases. I will be using LWJGL as a comparator in this suggestion, as I can see MoonLibs becoming even better than it.
In my limited experience as someone who is external to the project and looking in with heavy interest, if you made a release build, even an unstable one, it would make development with MoonLibs extremely easy.
What I am saying is: What you have here is literally the LWJGL (Light Weight Java Game Library) for Lua development. The only issue I noticed is, getting it up and running is a bit of a mountain to climb, especially on Windows systems.
Perhaps an auto build, or maybe a script to build for the developer per sub-project of MoonLibs could be incorporated?
If we look at LWJGL we have two options. Source code and precompiled JARs.
In the scenario with source code, MoonLibs has the inferior position in the fact that you can literally drag and drop them into the projects folder as you need them, BUT, they must be compiled with dependencies on the dev's system.
In the scenario where releases are made which contain the packaged compiled code which can be used as needed, the dev can simply get the released zips or .tar.gz files that have the compiled code into the folder and get up and running. Focusing on how to best utilize MoonLibs and then focusing on their actual project instead of how to get it running. After this all you need to do is drop a Lua executable into the project with a batch/shell script to automate running the main.lua. The only current issue is that dependencies are holding this back from being a painless process. Where as LWJGL has the JARs that have the precompiled code, MoonLibs only have source code which the dev must compile in order to utilize it.
Hopefully this makes sense, I am rooting for this project from the side lines and I hope to see it flourish. Thank you.