Hi folks,

As you may know, WMF's Platform Engineering group plans to embark on a major performance initiative this year, and had chosen inline scripting as having the biggest potential impact given what's practical now. Tim Starling build a Lua prototype last year which showed a lot of promise for making things much faster. One major decision before embarking on this effort was a decision on whether we'd stick with Lua or try another language such as Javascript or Victor's WikiScript implmentation. I wanted to make a decision by the end of the month[1], and I think we've done it.

We've decided to build a deployable version of Lua as a new alternative to wiki markup for templates, barring some scandalous revelation about Lua's lurid past or other unforeseen barrier. Tim will be leading this effort, and will start on the implementation some time after the dust settles on the 1.19 deployment and the Git migration. The project page for this is located here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting

Rough notes from our meeting yesterday are also available [2]

Rob

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/57769/... [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting/Meeting_2012-01-25