[asio-users] Emilua 0.5 released

[Vinícius d. S. O. <vin...@gm...>]

Emilua was announced here a few months ago as an execution engine for Lua
built on top of Boost.Asio. Now a new version has been released.

The focus for this release was refactoring the internals so it'd be easier
to build single-binary applications in the future. As an example of this
work, now Emilua only ever queries the filesystem if nothing is found on
the in-memory module cache. This allows you to pre-populate the module
cache with all Lua files that make up your Lua program from main(). Future
releases will improve this support even further by focusing on decreasing
module cache populating time.

So, what's in for C++ programmers? Not every piece of your C++ program is
critical. For boring tasks where performance doesn't matter as much, you
can just write it in Lua and enjoy a tight integration with
asio::io_context so it communicates adequately with your C++ code. You can
also set up some C++ routines to be called from Lua. There's a new tutorial
on how to embed this runtime in your C++ programs: <
https://docs.emilua.org/api/0.5/tutorial/embedding.html>.

Aside from this work, there are a couple of big features in this release as
well:

   - Support for Linux's Landlock.
   - Support for FreeBSD's Capsicum.

These are the sandboxing technologies that better accommodate
compartmentalised application development built around capabilities.

The full changelog is available at <
https://docs.emilua.org/api/0.5/changelog.html>.

This is also the last version that's going to include builtin HTTP and
WebSocket support. From 0.6 onwards you'll have to install a separate
plugin to have access to these features.

If you're writing libraries based on Boost.Asio, you might find it useful
to write Lua bindings using Emilua. This would give you:

   - A test bench to quickly iterate over your high-level API by hiding
   unimportant boilerplate found on C++ and ASIO code.
   - A cleaner language to write unit tests with.
   - A larger public for your API (Lua users).

I also found several bugs with Boost.Asio on FreeBSD while working on this
release, but I'm struggling to report them using Github. I'm not sure how
to proceed here. Is there an alternative way to send reports and pull
requests w/o Github?


-- 
Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira
https://vinipsmaker.github.io/