Facebook Lua libraries

[Pierre Chapuis]

Today I learned the Facebook AI Research team uses Torch
(and hence Lua), and released a set of libraries on GitHub:
https://github.com/facebook/fblualib

There are things that look interresting there, including
a REPL and a debugger. I am not sure how much they require
LuaJIT to work, or if some of them could work with PUC Lua.

Also this may warrant an update of
http://www.lua.org/uses.html :)

[Tudor Bosman]

Hi Pierre,

I wrote most of the code in the libraries that we released, so I can answer.

Post by Pierre Chapuis
There are things that look interresting there, including
a REPL and a debugger.

The debugger and the Lua/Python bridge are probably the most interesting
things there. Being able to use Torch tensors with all the scientific
computing code that's been written for Python is pretty cool.

Post by Pierre Chapuis
I am not sure how much they require
LuaJIT to work, or if some of them could work with PUC Lua.

They require LuaJIT for a few reasons: we use FFI, we rely on the
5.2-frontend-with-5.1-ABI language hybrid that LuaJIT provides, and we rely
on the fact that Lua errors and C++ exceptions play well together (mainly
that Lua errors cause C++ destructors to be called).

-Tudor.