I am stating it can be, and already is, used for other tasks, not just web servers. Although the server and networking cases were originally what it was built for and the plans were stay there.
Not "any" Rust library, the idea is to not reinvent the already made libraries out there for the use cases of the standard library, and rather make an interop with Lua. I am not sure what would count as unrelated to webservers but there are file system, templating, database, cryptography (minimal at the moment), serialization and deserialization moudles, with upcoming compression, logging, testing, and more coming soon https://github.com/ArkForgeLabs/Astra/issues/114
While I agree it is not in the technical terms a runtime, the inspiration for it was from BunJS and Deno and such. Similar projects in the Lua space also name themselves as runtime, so I wrote runtime as well. It is not exclusively for web, although it started as that. Nowadays Astra has libraries for many general things, and are used in a wide range of projects, from scripting, CI/CD, API servers, and more.
Lua does ship a runtime, although it is incredibly limited in standard library, and lacks a lot of features that other languages ship out of the box. I could have either made a library to be used with each Lua VM or package everything into a single binary which was what we needed for our use case anyways, and gave a lot of control for us as well.
In any case, I agree that I should have been more clear in the description. It has not been updated since a while and the project moves very fast.
I have created an issue https://github.com/ArkForgeLabs/Astra/issues/121 to track all the arguments said here. Let me know if theres anything else I should look into. Thank you all for your feedback.
You are correct on this, I should have been more clear about the description. When I wrote the description I was in the headspace of BunJS and Deno. I will make note of this and write a better README description.
hahaha it really is. Astro is another project that it also clashes with. When I was naming it, I was thinking of Warhammer's Astra Millitarum. But I forgot that it is a very popular name in general... my bad
Author of Astra here, loved seeing all the responses here. It wasn't planned to be anything beyond internal usage, but you are correct that I should have been more clear on the description and naming. In any case, it is far from production level.
For those wondering, it is not a Lua implementation, rather wrapping over available Rust crates with Lua bindings and packaging everything into a single binary to be used. It is the way it is because our CI was spending a lot of time compiling our Rust servers, so this was made to speed up development for simple to mid complexity servers. And since then grew to have more functionality.
Naming wise it is true that it is confusing with Astro and other similar naming projects I agree. Name suggestions are welcome!
Not "any" Rust library, the idea is to not reinvent the already made libraries out there for the use cases of the standard library, and rather make an interop with Lua. I am not sure what would count as unrelated to webservers but there are file system, templating, database, cryptography (minimal at the moment), serialization and deserialization moudles, with upcoming compression, logging, testing, and more coming soon https://github.com/ArkForgeLabs/Astra/issues/114