On 18/08/11 13:52, MZMcBride wrote:
- Has there a been a discussion/agreement about using a new scripting
language on Wikimedia wikis? I know Lua, JavaScript, StringFunctions and a bunch of other options have been endlessly discussed in the past. Does your e-mail mean that a decision is made and this can move forward?
In the past week, I've been working on a prototype Lua solution. I wrote an extension for PHP that embeds a Lua interpreter, with some extra features (such as CPU time and memory limits) that weren't present in the previous solutions. I will add support for it to the existing Lua extension for MediaWiki and add some extra features to that extension.
When that's done, we'll be able to compare it with WikiScripts in terms of performance and flexibility and to choose the most suitable solution.
I discussed WikiScripts extensively with Victor at Wikimania. At the start of the conference week, I was very keen on the idea, but as the week went on and I did more research, I became less keen on it and more keen on Lua. I told Victor that this was the situation, and that deployment of WikiScripts would depend on its benchmark performance and other criteria.
I'm very anxious about getting this right. I think the current situation with template programming on Wikimedia wikis is terrible, and I think it's largely my fault. The language is ugly and inaccessible, causing metatemplate editing to be confined to a small group of elite editors, and it's slow, causing save times of 40 seconds or more on popular articles. Perhaps by supporting the right solution here, I can gain some absolution.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26786#c24
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lua
-- Tim Starling