LuaJIT VS lua-languages

Unfortunately things aren't so simple, as when doing JIT compilation, LuaJIT _will_ try to shorten the lifetimes of local variables. Using the latest available version of LuaJIT (https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/commit/0d313b243194a0b8d239...), the following reliably fails for me:

  local ffi = require"ffi"

I am using https://luajit.org/ in my GCC C++ project.

Can I use this faster Lua JIT in my project as a replacement? And if so, how so?

The existing luajit doesn't do v5.1, so it would be nice to use this newer engine at the newer baseline lua version level.

The commit history looks pretty active...

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/commits/v2.1/

I think https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/commit/6a2163a6b45d6d251599... improved things a bit, notably making automatic tarballs work again.

There is nothing on luajit.org, so I assume that 2.0 doesn't have the extensions added (think the site is still on 2.0). However I found some proof in the mirrored git repo, that they do exist and also my luajit interpreter (2.1.0-beta3) shows them as builtins.

If you absolutely want a performant scripting runtime, I'd recommend taking a look at LuaJit, DaScript or AngelScript.

If you don't like that - look towards JIT-compilers. Lua has one

This post inspired me to look for an ML-like language that compiles to lua and I found this useful list: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

There's a complete list of languages that compile to Lua available here: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

There are a ton of different ways to do this but you haven't given enough information to give useful advice. What kind of language do you want to make? "as a module of smth else" doesn't really mean anything. https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

There's also gpanders/nvim-moonwalker, which advertises Fennel in it's readme but works for any x->lua language you return the lua code for, ie: teal, moonscript, uh... others?

I went on a several-weeks-long fact finding mission (the longest of its kind I've ever done in my 10 years as a professional software developer).

The option that won was to write all business logic (a few thousand lines of code) in Lua, then write the GUI in each platform's native language+ui-library combination and re-use the same business logic by embedding Lua.

Another option that made the shortlist was using Haxe instead of Lua, but after several weeks, it became clear that that was a bad idea, and with Lua, the developer experience is now so much better.

I definitely plan on continuing to use Lua as my main programming language.

This comes after 20 years of having python as my main programming language because I'm displeased with feature creep and bloat on python. With lua, I find that I barely miss any features/abilities from the vastly more complex python while the simplicity of lua means my code gets to "go places" where python can't go.

With lua, you find casual implementers making fully compatible alternative implementations (e.g. NeoLua for C#, Luna for Java, fengari for JavaScript, ...) With Python, alternative implementations seemingly just can't keep up with the pace at which CPython is introducing unnecessary new features and CPython-compatbility is de-facto the only meaningful python standard there is. Jython and IronPython would make the platform so much more appealing, but they appear dead in the water. Python implementations for the browser pop up every couple of years only to quietly disappear again.

What's more: Once you've settled on Lua as am embedding language, developers of Lua logic are free to use not just Lua, but they can pick from a host of cool transpile-to-Lua languages [1].

[1] https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

However, there are many languages to which this doesn’t apply (before Fennel I’ve tried to write Minetest mods in Haxe without success).

Maybe most of them are also small projects, but there are a lot of projects that compile other languages to Lua: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages .

Doubtful, but there is TypescriptToLua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Here's a whole list of languages that compile to Lua (many of them statically typed): https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

That's just because there are lots of lua transpilers. https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages