coffeescript VS Lua

Compare coffeescript vs Lua and see what are their differences.

coffeescript

Unfancy JavaScript (by jashkenas)

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)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
coffeescript Lua
54 118
16,419 7,889
- 2.3%
3.4 8.5
21 days ago 3 days ago
CoffeeScript 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.

coffeescript

Posts with mentions or reviews of coffeescript. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-10.
  • Ask HN: Why don't browsers just build a non-JS interpreter?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2024
  • alternatives to the javascript ecosystem
    2 projects | /r/webdev | 9 Jul 2023
    That said, there are ways to embrace the JS ecosystem without actually using JavaScript. Many popular languages have transpilers that will convert code written in that particular language into something that will run natively in a web browser (in other words, JavaScript). Even TypeScript is a language that gets transpiled into JavaScript, so it's not that outrageous of a concept, it just gets more difficult to do the further you get away from languages that don't already look like JavaScript.
  • Vanilla+PostCSS as an Alternative to SCSS
    15 projects | dev.to | 30 Mar 2023
    As a front-end web developer, do you still use CoffeeScript or jQuery? Unlikely, as TypeScript, ES/TC39 and Babel (and the retirement of Internet Explorer thanks to @codepo8 and his EDGE team) have helped to transform JavaScript into some kind of a modern programming language.
  • Por que Elm é uma linguagem tão deliciosa?
    11 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2023
  • An Introduction for TypeScript
    6 projects | dev.to | 31 Jan 2023
    CoffeeScript
  • Why React isn't dying
    2 projects | dev.to | 31 Jan 2023
    On the other hand, companies choose React because that's where all the developers are. If you want to build something that can be maintained years from now, you better not choose the next hype train that goes straight to nowhere (remember CoffeeScript ?). You want something battle tested that has stood the test of time, where you won't have trouble finding developers to scale once you need to. And nobody ever got fired for choosing React.
  • We're breaking up with JavaScript front ends
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Dec 2022
  • História sobre usar o JavaScript para programar JavaScript
    4 projects | dev.to | 31 Oct 2022
  • Civet: The CoffeeScript of TypeScript
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2022
    http://coffeescript.org/#expressions

    this comes from Lisp and makes a lot of things easier. Obviously this was not implemented in ES6 because it would break compatibility and there is also some problems with implicit returns that made the feature a bit weird

    I wonder if a syntax like this for JS would work:

    const eldest = if (24>41) { escape "Liz" } else { escape "Ike" }

    with "escape" working like a mix of "break" and "return". But even then this is likely to cause incompatibilities

    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2022
    Coffeescript[1] was a flavour of JS syntax meant to look similar to Ruby syntax. You just compiled it back to JS. It was nice for working on Rails projects since it made everything feel more “cohesive”.

    I assume this project is here for older Coffeescript[1] projects who want to start using typescript, and need access to interfaces/types that were present in old CS files.

    [1] https://coffeescript.org/

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 coffeescript and Lua you can also consider the following projects:

julia - The Julia Programming Language

assemblyscript - A TypeScript-like language for WebAssembly.

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

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

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

mal - mal - Make a Lisp

deno - A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.

hammerspoon - Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation with Lua

Elm - Compiler for Elm, a functional language for reliable webapps.

goscript - An alternative implementation of Golang specs, written in Rust for embedding or wrapping.

emacs-ng - A new approach to Emacs - Including TypeScript, Threading, Async I/O, and WebRender.

love - LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.