Just kicking some thoughts around. Would there be any interest having Lua
1 available in Autocad? Lua is a very simple, small, and fast programming language, which a lot of game developers use.
Anyway, I was playing around yesterday, hooking up some basic plumbing to bridge Lua and Autocad/AutoLisp. It's surprisingly easy to implement (there's a catch) and I can call basic Lua scripts from visual lisp. Right now it's limited to strings and doubles, and output does not go to the Autocad command line.
So, I'm on the fence about going any further, cause there is lots of coding needed to get it to work and fit right. My thoughts are that it should be portable across platforms, and CAD systems, which means no .Net CLR implemention (there are a couple Lua .Net implementations already).
I saw a company website
2 that implemented an older version of Lua and Acad back in 2002. It doesn't look like they've kept it up to date though, and I don't know if they would open source the code.
The biggest drawback I can see is Lua does not support Unicode. There are a couple Unicode packages available, but I don't know if they extend Lua to support it, or just convenience functions. Extending Lua to support Unicode would be a big task. For testing purposes I just did a quick wstring to string convert at the bridge.
Next big issue would be to extend Lua to support support Autocad resbuf types, and initially some of the AcGe structures. This task would be much easier than the Unicode one.
Of course it would be nice to have input output at the Autocad command line.
And, since Lua is written in C, all these extensions would touch (to nice a word) Lua's source code. Lua's source code is stable since 2008, with only a small patch issued since then.
[1]
http://www.lua.org/[2]
http://www.qsinformatica.it/white_paper03-e.asp