go-lua VS tengo

https://github.com/Shopify/go-lua

Unless you specifically need a JVM either of these will be a much more practical and mature choice for embedded scripting.

Alternatively if you prefer JS then Otto is a good choice:

Do you know about go-lua? There's a good discussion of various go lua implementations here, including this choice quote:

There are lua and Go-script options. My impression is that a few are well accepted but perhaps just a little less widely used than the first two. I cannot speak from personal experience on them. Shopify has a Lua 5.2 port: https://github.com/Shopify/go-lua and I know https://github.com/bitfield/script is one of the Go-like scripting languages, but I think it's more for a shell script replacement than embedding.

GopherLua [0] is a Lua implementation written in Go, not just a wrapper around the C implementation.

The main alternative seems to be Shopify’s go-lua [1], given that Microsoft’s golua [2] is no longer being developed. The main difference between these three implementations seems to be the supported Lua version - 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 respectively.

[0] https://github.com/yuin/gopher-lua

[1] https://github.com/Shopify/go-lua

[2] https://github.com/Azure/golua

> It also has a bunch of libraries for embedding scripting languages https://awesome-go.com/embeddable-scripting-languages, with Tengo _probably_ being the quickest https://github.com/d5/tengo

Yes, I noticed those packages recently. The problem is that there is little data about how reliable and maintainable goloader is going to be on the long term.

As I care about performance and security, I don't want a scripting language, but WASM seems to be a very promising possibility. I have made benchmarks with 2~3 WASM engines in Go, and so far I am not completely convinced about the quality and performance of the available APIs. Also, when compiling Golang to WASM, the native compiler is still abysmally bad and does not have full support for imports, so Tinygo is a must-have.

Anyway, modding is still a long term idea at this point, so hopefully the ecosystem will get more mature within a couple of years.

- https://github.com/d5/tengo

There are totally different things like https://github.com/d5/tengo but I don't know much about the docs, communities, or viability of them. Some like this one look very active and healthy. It might be worth considering.

I started doing this a few years ago when I wanted to add programmability to another system I was working on, and didn't want Lua or anything else like that. I set it aside when other priorities arose, and didn't return to it when I saw that others had already done the same thing (yaegi, tengo).