14 points by fud101 6 days ago
I downloaded it and compiled it and ran some toy programs. I have no idea how to use it for an actual project even though I have a stack of dusty rpi's and esp32s in the drawer.
Any one want to share their inspiration?
If you have some software that’s somewhat rigid you could make it scriptable by linking microquickjs.
For example, lately i was looking into patching dnsmasq to handle events but found out that the dhcp-script flag most likely does what i need.
Otherwise i could patch dnsmasq to load microquickjs, evaluate some javascript functions and hook into events emitted by the dnsmasq regular lifecycle.
I might end up doing that anyway, since it looks like a fun thing to do.
From the author of Redis on MicroQuickJS[1]:
> If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua.
With that in mind we can do a quick search to see how Lua is used. I found an article on Wikipedia titled "List of applications using Lua"[2]. Of course that's not an exhaustive list but it gives you a bit of an idea. Off the top of my head, the places I've personally seen Lua used:
1. modifying DNS responses in PowerDNS
2. neovim plugins
3. video game mods like Factorio
Personally I got into programming by writing shell scripts. I never studied computer science or IT. Instead it was the ability to write basic code for existing software that gave me this accidental introduction to the world of writing logic down as a set of machine-readable instructions. For me, MicroQuickJS is another one of those ways for "power users" (who may themselves be professional software developers) to extend some existing software without getting into the nitty gritty of the big bad upstream dev project.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368706
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_applications_using_Lua