assemblyscript VS Lua

Compare assemblyscript vs Lua and see what are their differences.

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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assemblyscript Lua
29 118
16,432 7,974
0.8% 1.8%
7.6 8.5
14 days ago 6 days ago
WebAssembly C
Apache License 2.0 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.

assemblyscript

Posts with mentions or reviews of assemblyscript. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-26.
  • Let's Write a Malloc
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    Incidentally, it’s also what AssemblyScript uses: https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/main/s...
  • Gentle Introduction To Typescript Compiler API
    6 projects | dev.to | 18 Nov 2023
    Use it as a Front-End for other low-level languages.
  • TypeScript Is Surprisingly OK for Compilers
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2023
    > MHO typescript could just cut loose from its javascript compatibility. Why not compile it to wasm instead of transpiling it to javascript?

    Check out AssemblyScript which is exactly that:

    https://www.assemblyscript.org/

  • Do you think typescript will ever have native support on brosers? Or we will have only the JS type annotations?
    2 projects | /r/typescript | 11 Jul 2023
    If you're curious, check out AssemblyScript, that might describe better what needs to be cut from TypeScript to make it possible to be compiled to WASM.
  • Ezno's checker (a Javascript type checker and compiler written in Rust) is now open source
    2 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jun 2023
    This is kinda the idea behind AssemblyScript, but IIRC it's more of a low-level typescript-ish syntax for WebAssembly.
  • Is there a TypeScript to native compiler available?
    1 project | /r/typescript | 13 May 2023
    https://www.assemblyscript.org/ maybe, but I'm not sure exactly what you need.
  • Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Apr 2023
    Exactly, WASM was designed to be very very lightweight... you can put a lot of logic into a very small amount of WASM, but you need a good compiler to do that, or write WASM by hand to really feel the benefit. If you just compile Go to WASM, with its GC, runtime and stdlib included in the binary, yeah it's going to be pretty heavy... Rust doesn't have a runtime but as you said, for some reason, produces relatively large binaries (not the case only in WASM by the way). Probably, the best ways to create small WASM binaries is to compile from C or from a WASM-native language like AssemblySCript (https://www.assemblyscript.org).
  • Dan Abramov responds to React critics
    5 projects | /r/reactjs | 25 Apr 2023
    Well we have all the new ECMA standards that will be introduced in 5 years now. It's looking more like Java actually. its accessor and typing patterns match it the most. TypeScript has had quite the profound influence over future ECMA design. There is a not so well known project called AssemblyScript which I think has a promising future. Since future ecma standards closely resembles it and TypeScripts popularity has exploded I have a feeling it may become a real standard as well.
  • AssemblyScript – TypeScript-like language for WebAssembly
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2023
  • Do any engines or optimizers product TS-specific performance gains?
    3 projects | /r/typescript | 24 Mar 2023
    If you can guarantee that Typescript type hints will always be followed, you can turn it into more optimised code. Unfortunately, this means you've got to break Javascript semantics, so this means creating a new language, but people have done it. For example, AssemblyScript is a language that is designed as a strict subset of Typescript that compiles directly down to WebAssembly instead of Javascript, producing much more efficient code (most of the time). The tradeoff is that it has some slightly different semantics to Javascript, which means your existing codebase — and most of the libraries you use — will probably require some adaption before running correctly in AssemblyScript.

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 assemblyscript and Lua you can also consider the following projects:

rust-ffmpeg-wasi - ffmpeg libraries precompiled for WebAsembly/WASI, as a Rust crate.

julia - The Julia Programming Language

interface-types

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

reference-types - Proposal for adding basic reference types (anyref)

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

ffmpeg.wasm - FFmpeg for browser, powered by WebAssembly

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

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

mal - mal - Make a Lisp

deno - A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.