luajit2 VS lua-languages

And Neovim is using OpenResty's branch of Luajit

Yea, LuaJIT can get near C speeds, as far as I'm aware. You can read more here: https://luajit.org/luajit.html

I also found this gtihub repo, this one is using luaJIT a just in time lua compiler, i dont know if you have any python expirience but this one, but from what i understand luaJIT makes lua a language that can be compiled and run in your terminal, it aperently also has a comminty made package/library manager called cherry.

openresty's LuaJIT2 has, and makes, regular releases (the last one was less than a month ago), and closely tracks development, including the extensions beyond Lua 5.1.

There is also the openresty fork of luajit which Neovim can be built with and provides their own releases.

luajit.org said

Remember, bad C++ code will certainly be slower than good code written in an interpreted language! That being said, Lua is very fast, one of the fastest scripting languages. See this thread, which talks about LuaJit.

https://github.com/openresty/luajit2

It has a few extras but they agree with the original luajit authors opinion that not every 5.2 feature can be made in jit.

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