Corona: Easy-To-Implement, High Performance, Native iPhone Apps Written In Lua
By 
Bay Area Beginning iPhone Programming Workshop: July 30-31. $799 with early bird price & “mo” discount code. Hurry: early bird price expires Weds!
Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh are the co-founders of Ansca Mobile and creators of Corona, a new & much talked-about Lua based kit for building native iPhone applications.
This interview includes details about creating Corona; a comparison of the programming model, memory management, performance and optimization using Corona/Lua vs Cocoa Touch/Objective-C; and Adobe’s upcoming iPhone Flash products.
You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.
For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:
- 1:00 Leaving Adobe and the path to creating Corona
- 4:00 Why Lua? Good for mobile: Code base small and good performance. Accessible for people comfortable doing web-scripting. Capable of handling serious engineering e.g., Photoshop Lightroom, World of Warcraft
- 7:00 Where does Lua stop and Corona begin?
- 8:45 Display layer atop OpenGL
- 9:15 Event/user-interaction mode (as compared e.g., to Cocoa Touch)
- 11:00 Memory management, garbage collection, memory consumption
- 12:45 Memory optimization for in-memory images
- 13:15 Graphics “painters” model
- 14:00 On-screen grouping
- 15:00 Getting started with Corona
- 15:30 What comes with the SDK
- 16:30 Interpreted on the phone? Compiled to native code? Some intermediate format?
- 19:00 Performance
- 21:30 Intended for “Flash-like” apps, or more broadly?
- 22:30 From here to 1.0: mostly about making it easy to get the code onto the device, making Internet calls
26:00 Flash on the iPhone scheduled for October…[update: while Adobe is releasing Flash for a number of phones in October the iPhone doesn’t appear to be one of them.]
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Wait, I know the Flash 10 beta for various smartphones is schedualed for Oct but I thought the iPhone wasn’t included in that. Has Adobe/Apple confirmed the iPhone Flash player release?
Assuming its not true, then Ansca still has a significant leg up on Adobe.
kp: I got that October date for Flash on the iPhone in some of the other press coverage about Ansca. When I asked Carlos and Walter about it they didn’t push back. But now, having researched some more, I see that iPhone is not one of the platforms in the Adobe announcement. My mistake.
Thanks for the clarification Dan.
That makes Corona just that much more interesting to those of us that do Flash desigh/dev and want an easier path to the iPhone.
Corona looks like a good engine, I hope they have tools that allow conversion of Adobe Flash files since it’s really the artists that love to use the Flash environment, and most I know are creatures of habit and wouldn’t be very excited about having to learn to use a new tool.
If Corona can make it easier for me to get their work onto the iPhone I’m all for it.
I’m coming to this conversation pretty late, but I’m confused why the question about flash was even asked. Other than these guys having worked in the past at Adobe, what is the connection between Lua and Flash? I mean, it seems to me that Corona competes more with Coscos2d, or perhaps phonegap than with flash, which, even if it were supported on the iPhone, would not (AFAIK) be an environment for developing your apps for release in the app store. Am I missing something?
Martin: the question is basically whether Flash on the iPhone obsoletes/kills Corona.