LuaJIT VS moonscript

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

Now I like lua, and think single pass is the way to go for interpreted, since you don't have the disadvantage of a slow compile time no matter how big your codebase gets, BUT its not great to write in. things like +=, ++, are not possible, which means the only solution is to transpile into it, which has led to some good languages like moonscript[0], teal[1] which offers static type checking, an absolute must as your codebase grows.

[0]: https://moonscript.org/

That can be very productive and clever, but be - and stay - aware that such polyglot solutions tend to be maintenance headaches in the longer run.

There is a really nice open source project out there that allows you to train your hearing and your sightreading, but it's written in the authors own language which in turn compiles to JavaScript and the headache to set up their toolchain is such that I haven't bothered fixing any of the bugs that I'm aware of (and there are plenty).

https://sightreading.training/

https://github.com/leafo/sightreading.training

It's written in a language called 'Moonscript':

https://github.com/leafo/moonscript

Which compiles to Lua. Which compiles to JS.

Madness. Nice madness, but still, it stopped me from being a contributor.

RE: the cost of switching at this point, what about languages that compile to Lua? Like https://moonscript.org/. That would let you keep the legacy code, no?

In the case of Lapis, it is actually written in Moonscript, which needs a few more things.

There's also some languages made to compile straight to Lua: - MoonScript is the most popular Lua wrapper - it's built to be more Python-like, featuring indentation-based scopes, function calls without parentheses, lambda syntax, list comprehension, and much more. - Yuescript is a modern update to MoonScript that adds more features (I haven't used it myself, so I'm not entirely sure exactly how it differs from MS). - Teal is a version of Lua that adds static typing for better code standards.

A programmer-friendly language that compiles to Lua.

This is a sample code for learning, written in Moonscript for TIC-80: