[ANN] std.prototype 1.0 released

I am happy to announce release 1.0 of std.prototype.

std.prototype's homepage is at https://github.com/lua-stdlib/prototype, with documentation at https://lua-stdlib.github.io/prototype.

This is a straight forward prototype-based object system, and a selection of useful objects build on it.

These modules started life in lua-stdlib. I’m in the process of slimming down lua-stdlib in preparation for the next release though, part of which means that you can now use std.prototype without requiring the installation of all of stdlib.

Install it with LuaRocks, using:

luarocks install std.prototype 1.0

Noteworthy changes in release 1.0 (2016-02-07) [stable]

New features (since lua-stdlib-41.2)

• Initial release, now separated out from lua-stdlib.

• Objects and Modules are no longer conflated - what you get back from a require "prototype.something" is now ALWAYS a module:

  local object = require "std.prototype.object"
  assert (object.type (object) == "Module")

  And the modules that provide objects have a new prototype field that contains the prototye for that kind of object:

  local Object = object.prototype
  assert (object.type (Object) == "Object")

  For backwards compatibility, if you call the module with a constructor table, the previous recommended way to disambiguate between a module and the object it prototyped, that table is passed through to the module's object prototype.

• Now that we have proper separation of concerns between module tables and object prototype tables, the central std.prototype.object.mapfields instantiation function is much cleaner and faster.

• We used to have an object module method, std.object.type, which often got imported using:

  local prototype = require "std.object".type

  So we renamed it to std.object.prototype to avoid a name clash with the type symbol, and subsequently deprecated the earlier equivalent type method; but that was a mistake, because core Lua provides type, and io.type (and in recent releases, math.type). So now, for orthogonality with core Lua, we're going back to using std.prototype.object.type, because that just makes more sense. Sorry!

Bug fixes

• You can now derive other types from std.prototype.set by passing a _type field in the init argument, just like the other table argument objects.
• In-order iteration with __pairs metamethod has been reinstated. There were no spec examples, and the implementation mysteriously went missing in a previous round of refactoring.

Incompatible changes

• Deprecated methods and functions have all been removed.
• std.tree is now std.prototype.trie and defines a Trie object, no a Tree object. The implementation has been a Radix Tree (aka Trie) all along.
• Objects no longer honor mangling and stripping _functions tables from objects during instantiation, instead move your actual object into the module prototype field, and add the module functions to the parent table returned when the module is required.