What are some great but little known libraries for Lua?

Question

A common statement said regarding Lua is that it doesn't come with batteries included; meaning that it lacks a lot of extra libraries.

I think there are a lot of Lua libraries out there and more are being developed all the time, but it is likely people don't know about many of them since the Lua community in general is very pragmatic about getting work done and doesn't waste a lot of time with self promotion.

So what are some great Lua libraries that more people ought to know about?

Answer 1

Shameless self-promotion plug: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/

I hope you find something that's useful there.

Answer 2

My personal favorites are:

• LuaSocket, a socket library enabling the use of internet with Lua
• The Kepler suite a set of libraries for web application development in Lua.
• LuaSQL and LuaSQLite for toying with DB stuff.

All this apart (or not as matter a fact) I highly recommend murgaLua for a batteries-included-but-not-bloated Lua distribution. It's crossplatform, and packs (non exhaustive list):

• a binding to FLTK for developing GUI applications
• LuaSQLite for sql stuff
• LuaSocket
• Basic encyption with slncrypt (blowfish, sha1, ...)
• Decent RNG
• And since the last beta release even a binding to FANN
• Audio via ProteAudio
• FFI via alien
• ...

And this whole beast packs in a measly 782kB executable.