origin

In the beginning, there was Sir Dennis Ritchie. And Ritchie saw the void, and outstretched his hand, and commanded “Let there be water.” And lo, it was so, and there was the C. And with the C, other entities dared to venture on the void given form. Lord Bjarne Stroustrup too did outstretch his hands and say “Let there be an abundance.” And lo, into the sea was cast a double portion of surplus of all the things that swam. And for a while, it was good. But other entities were still curious about what yet lay undefined, and one such pantheon, PUC-RIO, saw that it fitting to create. And thusly, they banded together and declared “Let there be a Moon”. And thusly, the moon was born into the sky.

And with the waters and sea made and the moon cast in a starry night sky, PUC-RIO and Ritchie and Stroustrup saw that they did good. They oversaw the moon and the sea and all its abundance, and gave sound council and it overflowed wonderfully. But as the time grew, life grew… discontent. No longer were the simple fishing rods and the flowing tides and the dark sky enough lit by a pale moon and stars enough, no matter how miraculously they were made. They sought out more.

They sought out the light.

And lo, Danny Y., Rapptz did stand firm in the sea and cast his hands to the sky and said “Let there be Light!”. And in the sky was cast a Sun. It was an early sun, a growing sun, and many gathered to its warmth, marveling at a life they never knew. And he saw that it was good…

seriously

sol was originally started by many moon cycles ago to interop with Lua and C++, by Rapptz. It was very successful and many rejoiced at having an easy to use abstraction on top of the Lua API. Rapptz continued to make a number of great projects and has been busy with other things, so upon seeing the repository grow stagnant and tired in the last very long while (over a year), ThePhD forked it into Sol3 and rebooted the code with the hopes of reaching the Milestone and the documentation you have today.

To get to the old repo, head over here.

the name

sol means sun. The moon (Lua) needs a sun, because without it only the bleak night of copy-paste programming and off-by-one errors would prevail. … Or something.