Yes, you read that right.
I was poking around with Lua implementations and ran across LuaJ, which is an implementation of Lua written in Java.
Well, after following Davanum Srinivas's instructions on how to convert a standard JAR into one that can be installed in Android, I was able to get it to run Lua scripts inside the Android emulator.
It shouldn't be too hard to write a regular Android application that would allow the user to type in Lua chunks and run them. I haven't seen much in terms of scripting capabilities for the Android platform... Lua would be a good fit for that.
The only caveat is that the LuaJ implementation is generating and running Lua bytecodes in a Lua VM. Which is running on top of the Dalvik VM. So it is going to be crazy slow. It's kind of amazing that it runs at all, Google must have implemented a lot of the core Java stuff, including reflection.
Now here's an interesting tidbit... The Dalvik VM is register based, as opposed to the stack based JVM. And the Lua VM is register based. So what are the possibilities for "native" (by this I mean Dalvik) code generation by the LuaC compiler?
Does the Dalvik VM even support having some memory buffer contain some bytecode that it will then execute? Would we have to go through the filesystem instead (meaning generating a .dex archive or such)? Inquiring minds want to know.
There seems to be a lot of potential in general for a decent scripting language on the Android platform.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
ConnectBot issue fixed
I mentioned having a problem with ConnectBot previously. Downloaded the source, found the problem, submitted a patch, it was accepted, downloaded the development snapshot... and it works! Life is good.
Monday, June 22, 2009
2009H1 Update
Here's a semi-yearly update of what's going on in my tech life:
Haven't been hacking any Haskell lately. It's a brilliant language, but one I never got comfortable enough with. We're trying to use Python for application and test script development at work, which is OK so far.
I've been investigating Lua a lot recently. We've experimented with it for a couple embedded projects so far. It is just about the only scripting language that will fit into small embedded platforms... everything else is just too hard to port. You can easily configure Lua to just include the parts you want. So for that reason alone, I think I'll be pushing for its use on future projects.
The more I've learned about the design of Lua, the more I like it. The language itself has a lot of neat features. It is very compact, very Scheme-like. But better than Scheme in that its fundamental data structure is the table, instead of a linked list. It has pretty good support for functional programming, tail call optimization, and coroutines too.
The implementation is small enough to learn and hack easily. As opposed to GHC... Don't get me wrong, it is a phenomenal work, but if you've ever looked under the hood of that compiler... yikes.
In other news I bought an Android Developer G1 phone. I've downloaded a popular community firmware, and also loaded Ubuntu on it. Still got some configuration issues to work out, and ConnectBot is giving me some problems while running VIM. Just have a 2.5G data service plan, which is a little pokey when out and about. But it's looking good so far.
I've wanted a decent, portable Linux machine to do hacking on for a long time... dating back to the days when I was messing around with trying to get a cut-down version of Linux running on a HP 100 LX palmtop. And now I'm there... with the Ubuntu userland installed it has Python and Lua, VIM, screen, ssh, rsync and GCC. A decent browser, always-on (if slow) Internet, WiFi, Bluetooth, expandable storage... and it makes phone calls too! How cool is that?
Haven't been hacking any Haskell lately. It's a brilliant language, but one I never got comfortable enough with. We're trying to use Python for application and test script development at work, which is OK so far.
I've been investigating Lua a lot recently. We've experimented with it for a couple embedded projects so far. It is just about the only scripting language that will fit into small embedded platforms... everything else is just too hard to port. You can easily configure Lua to just include the parts you want. So for that reason alone, I think I'll be pushing for its use on future projects.
The more I've learned about the design of Lua, the more I like it. The language itself has a lot of neat features. It is very compact, very Scheme-like. But better than Scheme in that its fundamental data structure is the table, instead of a linked list. It has pretty good support for functional programming, tail call optimization, and coroutines too.
The implementation is small enough to learn and hack easily. As opposed to GHC... Don't get me wrong, it is a phenomenal work, but if you've ever looked under the hood of that compiler... yikes.
In other news I bought an Android Developer G1 phone. I've downloaded a popular community firmware, and also loaded Ubuntu on it. Still got some configuration issues to work out, and ConnectBot is giving me some problems while running VIM. Just have a 2.5G data service plan, which is a little pokey when out and about. But it's looking good so far.
I've wanted a decent, portable Linux machine to do hacking on for a long time... dating back to the days when I was messing around with trying to get a cut-down version of Linux running on a HP 100 LX palmtop. And now I'm there... with the Ubuntu userland installed it has Python and Lua, VIM, screen, ssh, rsync and GCC. A decent browser, always-on (if slow) Internet, WiFi, Bluetooth, expandable storage... and it makes phone calls too! How cool is that?
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