Board Thread:Lua Help/@comment-23880286-20150814202613/@comment-4522253-20150818211129

Dessamator wrote: Interesting. I expected as much for the DPL engine. Category functions seemed to be simple functionality, and of course they are right. DPL is quite an expensive function, and with lua it can be abused to cause severe server problems. In fact I read a similar answer from the scribunto developer a few months back, about listing pages...

A similar problem exists with mw.title.new("").getContent.

Although it would be interesting to build a list of existing modules dynamically. For example, we could list all the lua libraries stored here. Using require and a xpcall it should be possible to determine for example some dependencies of a particular module, with no expensive calls at all, but even that would be limited to 100 calls. Well, actually, he's got a faulty premise in there. DPLE does not actually use DPL. It's a from-scratch implementation and does not even require a DPL installation. We use DPL and are trying to minimize the calls to it and largely succeed with caching. A completely different method is being used with DPLE, and I'd like to see if it's more or less expensive than DPL. That may be a switching point for some to start using Lua, and I'm not thrilled it is being dismissed without testing.

It's not so difficult to see which Modules are in a single wikia using Special:AllPages&namespace=828 and I believe Wikipedia has a Module for exactly what you're asking without the expensive calls.

I'll admit, I am terrified of using mw.title and am still puzzling out how helpful it is.