[JW Lua] RGP Lua Announcement

[Robert Patterson]

This message is to announce the initial release of a new Finale-embedded
Lua interpreter called RGP Lua. The reason for this project is that the
much-appreciated JW Lua has an uncertain future. It has not been updated
since 2017. It is gradually becoming incompatible with new releases of
Finale, and it will stop working entirely under a likely imminent release
of Finale for Apple Silicon.

Nearly all existing scripts should work identically as in JW Lua. There are
a few incompatibilities, however. Most notable is that I haven't
implemented finenv.UserValueInput. (You can use FCCustomWindow instead.
It's slightly more cumbersome to use but looks far better.) Also, the setup
and development environments are completely different, though simple to
use. Downloads and documentation are here:

https://robertgpatterson.com/-fininfo/-rgplua/rgplua.html

JW Lua has also had some long-standing limitations that we all would like
to see addressed. I am interested in feedback as to what is most important
to the community. Here are some ideas of mine:

Support for modeless dialogs. This will be easy to implement within my
code, so I'll probably do it soon. But it will require some changes to how
scripts interact with RGP Lua, so I'll cover it in a separate post if there
is interest.

Moving past Lua 5.2 to...what? To LuaJIT? (LuaJIT is based on Lua 5.1 and
appears to be abandoned.) To Lua 5.4? (Lua 5.3 and higher introduce
breaking changes in how Lua number to integer conversion happens which has
potentially a huge impact on existing JW Lua scripts.) Maybe just stay put?

Direct support for the new doc-settings classes in F26.2 and higher.

Addition of missing classes. I'm betting FCTieMods is high on a number of
lists. But anything I add will need testing beyond what I can do by myself.
In the case of FCTieMods, I worry that there was some reason Jari never
implemented it, though I don't see it if there is.

Two big enhancements already in RGP Lua are 1) support for Lua
5.2-compatible C libraries and 2) the option to embed luasocket for
external debugging or other purposes.

Best,
Robert
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