Back in 2011 the Eclipse Koneki project was started to gather tools arround M2M technologies. One of the tools was an IDE for the Lua language, as Lua is suitable for efficient embedded development. The Lua Development Tools IDE is mature IDE dowloaded thousands times with an active user community on the Koneki forum.
The main goal of this project is to provide Eclipse quality tooling for Lua. It includes the Lua IDE and tools to support the full development lifecycle including code editing, documenting, debugging, and testing with Lua. Lua code analysis tools such as code metrics generators or bugs prediction engines are also in scope.
The Lua Development Tools project provides a comprehensive IDE and tools for Lua developers.
We want to provide lacking Lua tooling for the Eclipse ecosystem. Eclipse is a powerful and well known platform, building an Lua IDE on top of it is a way to provide to Lua developers not only a Lua file edition, but also a debugger, remote tools, and a C/C++ environment in the same tool. Contributing to the simultaneous release of Eclipse will provide LDT greater visibility, and provide us access to more feedback and a larger community.
Initial contribution is expected after Luna Release (summer 2014). First build should be ready one or two month after.
We plan to make our first release for winter 2015.
We want to increase code contributions on the project. We though a lot about Lua developpers, they are not famillar with Java and Eclipse development. That's why we plan to add ways to extend LDT functionalties using Lua.
Support of GOTO/LABEL from Lua 5.2 syntax is also a wanted feature.
We also plan to provide documentation and maybe some features about C and Lua interoperability from Eclipse.