Hello folks, I’m Lee. I initiated the L5 creative coding library, a Processing library in Lua. There are suggested proposal areas relating to Expanding L5 on the Project Ideas List.
I’m writing here because I received a direct message asking how to strengthen a proposal relating to L5 and in the interest of public conversation I wanted to post the response publicly here.
Personally, I don’t think you need to already be an expert in Lua. Folks with background in p5.js/Javascript and Processing/Java would most likely be able to jump in fairly quickly to working in L5/Lua. See L5 for Processing/p5.js programmers for example.
To help strengthen a proposal relating to L5, it’s a great idea to install L5 and try running the L5 starter program. You could try creating programs, running example code, and generally get a feel for what setup and debugging feel like. Review L5’s Contributing documentation, take a look at the L5 issues, L5 website issues, and this less formal TODO list. L5 is a new project so there’s lots of opportunities for testing, including building out a test suite potentially, and lots of bug fixes and refactoring, improving error messages, and completing some Processing and p5 functions.
Other proposal ideas that could be quite useful are helping to build a first version of sound and camera libraries for L5. For sound, Love2d (our underlying framework) already has sound sample functions, and we could create a nice wrapper around the FFI library for additional sound synthesis to get closer to parity with p5.sound. For video, we already have built in much video functionality, though for running a webcam, I have successful tests using a C library that would need to be integrated a bit better. My first successful build of a webcam library for L5 (using some C code) is here.
One other area that is distinct from other Processing/p5 languages is that L5 is also motivated by a desire to build a creative coding library that is accessible even on older hardware, and with a goal of running long into the future, inspired by the community of practice and concept of Permacomputing. There is a dedicated page for L5 on the Permacomputing wiki. You’ll see noted there a tension with hosting on GitHub forge, and another area to explore would be moving to a different forge or considering other infrastructure ideas (self-hosted, Codeberg, etc).
So these are all areas to consider, and engaging with a number of them would help strengthen a proposal. But obviously, you don’t need to take all of this on, and you are welcome to make other proposals! Feel free to ask additional questions relating to a Summer of Code application here. And for general L5 discussions and questions, you are also welcome to post on Discourse in the new L5 category.