[q2x] Alive

[Brian Hook]

> How about supplying tarballs of the versions of the libraries that
> you are developing with, which expand into q2x/libs (using a
> supplied batch file?). The tgzs could go into cvs and the q2x
> makefiles could all call the lib makefiles. 

Good idea.  That way I can have the blessed versions, and it would be 
up to the individual user to either extract those files or point the 
makefiles/project files to their own local copies.

> guess this assumes that the libraries being used are in a fairly
> stable state as you don't really want to update the tarballs daily.

Right.

> Mmmm, that does look quite interesting. Would you support Lua as
> well?

I'm not sure.  I like Lua, in theory, but in practice it always seems 
to irritate me with something =)

> I was hoping that q2x would develop into a Lua tutorial type
> project. What do you see as the main advantages of using Io over
> Lua?

The primary advantages are stated on their Web page, but the major 
things (for me) are:

- an object model that I'm more comfortable with (it directly handles 
OO messaging instead of emulating it as in Lua)

- tricolor incremental GC instead of the hiccup prone GC that Lua has

That's really the major stuff.  It does have several downsides:

- very poor documentation (not that Lua is that much better, but Lua 
is much more mature)

- relatively new, which means it can be a moving target somewhat (same 
thing with Lua), and it's not fully debugged

I'm not making any decisions just yet, I still need to get the primary 
tree cleaned up massively before I do the first public check-in.  I 
really want the code to be relatively clean and solid before we start 
monkeying around with it.

Brian