Re: neovim and luajit?

[HiPhish <hiphish@posteo.de>]

I just want to add my 2 cents to the discussion. Officially Neovim supports only 
Lua 5.1 as its extension language according to the manual (`:h lua-intro`):

> The Lua 5.1 language is builtin and always available.

Using LuaJIT allows the use of some extensions to Lua 5.1, but plugins relying 
on this functionality are strictly speaking non-portable because not all users 
might have them. I don't know if it is possible with Guix, but the ideal 
solution would be to use LuaJIT where available and fall back on Lua 5.1 
otherwise.

On Sunday, 25 April 2021 09:15:57 CEST Efraim Flashner wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 01:33:58AM -0400, Jack Hill wrote:
> > On Fri, 31 Jul 2020, Jack Hill wrote:
> > > Hi Guix,
> > > 
> > > I'm wondering why we use Lua 5.1 instead of LuaJIT for neovim? It seems
> > > that upstream prefers LuaJIT given the non-default configure flag we
> > > use[0] and their FAQ[1].
> > > 
> > > I don't have an opinion either way. I'm learning about neovim today, and
> > > am curious how we arrived at our configuration.
> > > 
> > > [0]
> > > https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/vim.scm?id
> > > =96a655a77bb087397a9436391e472c36ff0a2ec2#n647 [1]
> > > https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#why-embed-lua-instead-of-x
> > > 
> > > Best,
> > > Jack
> > 
> > I've returned to the above question. With the attached patch, neovim
> > builds
> > on x86_64 and performs basic editing functions. I did not test it with any
> > extra packages or plugins.
> > 
> > In addition to what I said before, I'm also interested in LuaJIT because
> > it
> > supports the 5.1 language and still seems to be developed upstream. Lua is
> > no longer developing the 5.1 series and the newer series have an
> > incompatible language.
> > 
> > A downside to using LuaJIT is that it doesn't support all the
> > architectures
> > that Guix supports [2]. In particular, it looks like aarch64 and ppc64el
> > are missing.
> > 
> > [2] https://luajit.org/install.html
> > 
> > Best,
> > Jack
> > 
> > P.S. Maybe its time to work on the Lua language of Guile 😀
> 
> Our copy of luajit supports aarch64 so I don't think that's a problem.
> (Last I checked) Debian has a patch to replace powerpc support with
> 64-bit ppc support. I'd go ahead with the change if that's the direction
> that neovim is going and let the powerpc64le people decide between using
> lua5.1 or just removing lua support on a per-architecture basis for
> ppc64le.