Lua 5.3

[rvirding]

What is the interest in having a version of luerl which supports Lua 5.3? I just have to work out a simple way of supporting both 5.2 and 5.3 in git. Separate branches?

[novabyte]

@rvirding Lua 5.3 support would be awesome! 😄

A possible way to support 5.2 and 5.3 would be to do something similar to this compat library. It makes changes to the global environment with the new standard library functions in Lua 5.3. I'm not sure how well this would work in luerl as it'd depend on how the standard library is defined in the environment.

This would minimise the code management overhead of two different git branches and give developers choice whether to enable 5.3 or not. What do you think?

[ghost]

I think the best way to handle this upgrade is to freeze 5.2 and tag it. Then implement:

• bitwise operators
• utf-8 support (is this not already a thing?)
• string.pack/unpack/packsize

I'm personally most interested in the new string functions, and I'd be happy to help out. Hopefully people are still interested in this.

[artob]

Certainly interested to contribute to 5.3 support here as well, if it would be welcome and there'd be a clear way to proceed. Separate branches probably make sense.