HVM VS Lua

Compare HVM vs Lua and see what are their differences.

HVM

A massively parallel, optimal functional runtime in Rust (by HigherOrderCO)

Lua

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. (by lua)
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HVM Lua
107 118
7,101 7,974
2.5% 2.1%
6.7 8.5
about 2 months ago 8 days ago
Rust C
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

HVM

Posts with mentions or reviews of HVM. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-12.
  • SaberVM
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    Reminds me of HVM[0]

    [0]https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

    Really interesting to see how new lang concepts and refinements keep popping up this last decade, between Vale, Gleam, Hylo, Austral...

    Linear types really opened up lots of ways to improve memory management and compilation improvements.

  • GPU Survival Toolkit for the AI age: The bare minimum every developer must know
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
  • A new F# compiler feature: graph-based type-checking
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Nov 2023
    I have a tangential question that is related to this cool new feature.

    Warning: the question I ask comes from a part of my brain that is currently melted due to heavy thinking.

    Context: I write a fair amount of Clojure, and in Lisps the code itself is a tree. Just like this F# parallel graph type-checker. In Lisps, one would use Macros to perform compile-time computation to accomplish something like this, I think.

    More context: Idris2 allows for first class type-driven development, where the types are passed around and used to formally specify program behavior, even down to the value of a particular definition.

    Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2?

    Also related, is this similar to how HVM works with their "Interaction nets"?

    https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

    https://www.idris-lang.org/

    https://clojure.org/

    I'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again.

  • A History of Functional Hardware
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2023
    Impressive presentation but I find two things missing in particular:

    * GRIN [1] - arguably a breakthrough in FP compilation; there are several implementation based on this

    * HVM [2] - parallel optimal reduction. The results are very impressive.

    [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-63237-9_19

    [2] https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

  • Is the abstraction of lazy-functional-purity doomed to leak?
    1 project | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 11 Jun 2023
    Purity has nothing to do with memoization. Haskell's semantics never "rewrite under a lambda" (unlike, e.g. HVM). Calling (\_ -> e) () twice will (modulo optimizations) always perform the computation in e twice.
  • Can one use lambda calculus as an IR?
    3 projects | /r/Compilers | 6 Jun 2023
    The most recent exploration of this, that I'm aware of is HVM (another intermediate language / runtime), although this one is not actually based on the lambda calculus, but on the interaction calculus.
  • The Rust I Wanted Had No Future
    4 projects | /r/rust | 5 Jun 2023
    Then, actually unrelated but worth mentioning: HVM. Finally, something new on the functional front that isn't dependent types!
  • The Halting Problem Is Decidable on a Set of Asymptotic Probability One (2006)
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2023
  • Bachelor Thesis Topic
    1 project | /r/rust | 24 May 2023
    If you are into functional PL, how about https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM? You could experiment if you could schedule that on a GPU?
  • For those of you self taught,how did you cope with distractions while using a computer ?
    2 projects | /r/ADHD_Programmers | 8 May 2023
    In the interest of seeking ways of optimizing my code, I stumbled upon http://www.rntz.net/datafun/ as a means to do incremental computations of fixpoints while avoiding redundant work. And also the idea of automatic parallelism achieved by using Interaction Nets as a model of computation https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM.

Lua

Posts with mentions or reviews of Lua. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-19.
  • 5-Step Approach: ProjectSveltos Event Framework for Kubernetes Deployment with Cilium Gateway API
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Feb 2024
    The EventSource uses the Lua language to search for any services with ports set to 80 or 443 in the ‘argocd’ namespace. More examples can be found here.
  • Building a Wordle Clone with Lua! 🕹
    3 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2024
    If you're new to the 12 in 24 series, I'm learning and building projects with a new programming language every month - this month, it's the Lua scripting language. You can find source code for the projects I build in the official GitHub repository (check it out, this week's folder contains code for both this and two other bonus projects!).
  • Gearing up for Lua
    3 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024
    This month, we're talking about Lua. It's not always a first choice when it comes to programming, but I think there's a lot to enjoy about this little language. Heck, I'm a big game development fan myself - I would look into it even if that was the only reason to.
  • Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
    It’s Portuguese. It’s the same in the Lua codebase [1].

    [1]: https://github.com/lua/lua

  • Fluent Bit with ECS: Configuration Tips and Tricks
    4 projects | dev.to | 26 Dec 2023
    If we think we need more flexibility for processing records, we can write our own embedded filters using Lua language. Lua is a highly efficient programming language used mainly for embedded scripting.
  • A Linguagem Lua completa 30 anos!
    3 projects | dev.to | 17 Oct 2023
  • The Top 20 Programming Languages and Their Origins
    7 projects | dev.to | 24 Sep 2023
    Lua
  • Lua C headers, MacOS
    2 projects | /r/lua | 7 Sep 2023
    ➜ ~ brew info lua ==> lua: stable 5.4.6 (bottled) Powerful, lightweight programming language https://www.lua.org/ /opt/homebrew/Cellar/lua/5.4.6 (29 files, 788.7KB) * Poured from bottle using the formulae.brew.sh API on 2023-05-16 at 11:03:06 From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/l/lua.rb License: MIT ==> Caveats You may also want luarocks: brew install luarocks ==> Analytics install: 16,599 (30 days), 56,745 (90 days), 139,027 (365 days) install-on-request: 1,763 (30 days), 6,266 (90 days), 21,105 (365 days) build-error: 0 (30 days)
  • How do you like code documentation inline in the source code vs. as separate guides, or how would you do it?
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 3 Jul 2023
    I think Lua is a good example of doing documentation well. The source code is commented only as much as needed, mainly with brief comments about things that might not be obvious and a small number of longer explanations of how the architecture works (mainly relevant to developers). It also has a super nice feature that's surprisingly rare: each file has a very short line at the top that describes what the file is, so you don't have to guess based on the filename alone. The API is documented in a single HTML file on the website that has both the high level descriptions of the language and architecture, as well as documentation for each public-facing function. The docs are maintained by hand, but the API is mostly stable, so the docs don't need to change very often.
  • Total Noob With a Question.
    2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 27 Jun 2023
    This is using the Lua language and the Solar2d game framework

What are some alternatives?

When comparing HVM and Lua you can also consider the following projects:

Kind - A next-gen functional language [Moved to: https://github.com/Kindelia/Kind2]

julia - The Julia Programming Language

rust-gpu - 🐉 Making Rust a first-class language and ecosystem for GPU shaders 🚧

assemblyscript - A TypeScript-like language for WebAssembly.

SICL - A fresh implementation of Common Lisp

NvChad - Blazing fast Neovim config providing solid defaults and a beautiful UI, enhancing your neovim experience.

Sharp-Bilinear-Shaders - sharp bilinear shaders for RetroPie, Recalbox and Libretro for sharp pixels without pixel wobble and minimal blurring

lua-nginx-module - Embed the Power of Lua into NGINX HTTP servers

fslang-suggestions - The place to make suggestions, discuss and vote on F# language and core library features

kotlin-script-examples - Examples of Kotlin Scripts and usages of the Kotlin Scripting API

atom - A DSL for embedded hard realtime applications.

mal - mal - Make a Lisp