I love LÖVE. For me it sits at the perfect intersection between high and low level abstraction. Unfortunately the latest released version is getting pretty long in the tooth now and a lot of devs use the latest HEAD from the repo since it has better performance and compatibility. One day the mythical 12.0 will get released for real…..
It’s been a recurring issue I’ve seen in open source where there is active development but no releases. I don’t get why you’d put all the work in to fixing bugs and building features but not hit the button to build a release.
Been there before, usually because you always feel like there is "one more thing to get into the release" before you consider it "done enough", and that keeps moving. At one point, you've diverged far enough from the previous release, either by time or scope, that now you feel like the next release really should come with major improvements because of other API breakages already, so now you want to fit in more, so the next release after that can skip more breakages.
Rinse and repeat over months, with volunteers, in a game engine no less, and I can easily see many projects being unable to not fall into that trap.
Anyways, I think it's less of an issue for people in practicality, most people who use LÖVE today tends to start with the HEAD source version, which also sets them up to easier contribute back upstream, when they inevitably hit something non-optimal, so maybe it works out in favor for everyone in the end anyways.
The main issue is that distros will only package the latest release. I had a situation where LMMS on their website had download links pointing to the “beta” builds, while the one on all the disto repos was several years behind.
Right now I have a workflow breaking bug in Inkscape which was fixed last year on main but hasn’t made it to a release yet. So my only option is to compile from source.
There being a stigma about a release being “ready” needs to go. Stuff should get only get merged in to main when it’s ready to go live, or behind a feature flag.
You might like MonoGame. Same level of abstraction, but in C#.
https://monogame.net
Since we've stepped from interpreted language (Lua) to compiled-to-VM language (C#), let's go all the way down to compiled, low-level language (C) with Raylib!
https://www.raylib.com/
Or use raylib from luajit FFI and blow C# out of the water. Luajit can be faster than C, truly alien tech from Mike Pall.
"long in the tooth"
How? has Lua changed any?
Or all the references are to old versions?