luau VS IntelliJ-Luanalysis

As far as I can tell, they aren't.

http://lua-users.org/wiki/SandBoxes

There is a lot of information there, but it doesn't handle resource exhaustion, execution time limits or give any guarantees. It does indicate that it's possible, and has a decent example of the most restrictive setup, which is a good start. But I would for example compare it with Luau's SECURITY.md.

From https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/blob/master/SECURITY.md:

> Luau provides a safe sandbox that scripts can not escape from, short of vulnerabilities in custom C functions exposed by the host. This includes the virtual machine and builtin libraries. Notably this currently does not include the work-in-progress native code generation facilities.

> Any source code can not result in memory safety errors or crashes during its compilation or execution. Violations of memory safety are considered vulnerabilities.

> Note that Luau does not provide termination guarantees - some code may exhaust CPU or RAM resources on the system during compilation or execution.

So, even luau will have trouble with untrusted code, but it specifies exactly what happens and so on. I think that's fair enough.

Alternatively, Luau is a well-supported Lua variant with type checking and performance improvements, aimed more towards being a sandboxed embedded scripting environment.

https://luau-lang.org/

If you need Lua but also type-safety, how about Luau [1] then?

[1] https://luau-lang.org/

I had the pleasure of working with Lua 5.1 back in the late noughties. For me it's replaced Tcl whenever I want something I can configure above a C library. At the time I used it I found it quite nice but I'll also not forget the hours I wasted tracking down nil table corruptions which could have easily been caught by a type checker.

I had some hope that Luau https://luau-lang.org or Teal https://github.com/teal-language/tl would make things better but with the following example

    function foo(x: number): string

Looking at other replies here, I can see I wasn't the only one who didn't realize there is Lua and Luau. Luau is an extension of Lua: https://luau-lang.org/

> Luau is syntactically backwards-compatible with Lua 5.1 (code that is valid Lua 5.1 is also valid Luau); however, we have extended the language with a set of syntactical features that make the language more familiar and ergonomic.

Lua is usually the embedded language of choice. If you are focused on security, you could check out the Roblox fork, Luau (https://github.com/Roblox/luau) where the creators took extra care to lock down the language on what scripts could do.

Luau - Lua variant by Roblox

On a side note, I've heard that they recently switched from Lua to Roblox's own fork of Lua, Luau.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=luau+roblox&sp=...

Luau

https://github.com/Roblox/luau

Roblox wrote a superset of Roblox Lua which is way faster

https://luau-lang.org/ - some documentation, and examples https://create.roblox.com/docs - documentation, tutorials, and examples https://www.youtube.com/user/AlvinBLOX - tutorials https://www.youtube.com/@TheDevKing/videos - tutorials https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/ - not specific to Roblox, but Lua reference manual https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-lua - Lua on Codecademy

Because of compile-time type safety / static analysis. And I say this as the author of an IDE that bolts those features onto Lua: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

I want to start adding support for Lua derivatives to my IDE (which adds static type checking to Lua - inference, structural & nominal types, generics etc. (Luanalysis - https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis/)

I feel like plugin support would be best but I've no idea how that's supposed to work in the presence of a predefined grammar. There's also so many variants I don't think there's a good way to build composite grammar.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to extend language parsing? For reference, I'm using https://github.com/JetBrains/Grammar-Kit.

There's also my IDE which just bolts on types (both structural and nominal) to regular Lua - no transpiling as the types are defined with comments (or inferred).

https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis/

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to give it as much attention as it deserves recently.

What do you mean by no lambdas exactly? Lua supports anonymous functions and those functions capture variables from their outer scope.

I use functional programming extensively in Lua also. Could you elaborate on what it doesn't permit?

Integers were introduced in 5.3.

Assigning operators? It has metatables, you can absolutely implement your own operators.

If you want static typing you can use my IDE: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis/

Granted, my IDE is incredibly opinionated and not for everyone.

Also, Lua is not my favourite language to use, doesn't even make top 3. However, the robustness of its design, considering its simplicity, is incredibly elegant.

Anyway, you can find screenshots in the project's README on Github: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (Post-Covid)

Technologies: Kubernetes, AWS, TypeScript, Ruby, React. Polyglot, refer to résumé.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VJk9gs1-LN3e333ZDICwkG5pgTb...

Email: [email protected]

Github: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamindobell/

Current Role: CTO @ Snaploader

Salary Expectation: $200,000+ USD

These days I describe myself as a full-stack developer, but I’ve also plenty of professional experience with mobile (native + React Native), infrastructure, ops, game development, tooling and reverse engineering. In my free time I also tinker with embedded systems. I’m an avid open source contributor, but also maintain many of my own open-source projects e.g. a Lua IDE which statically type checks Lua (https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis).

I’ve 12+ years of development experience, the last six years I’ve been CTO of Snaploader, a small start-up in Australia which turns floor-plans and CAD drawings into real-time rendered 3D buildings that run in your browser (including mobile). HQ is interstate, thus the role has always been near 100% remote. There’s a team of 20+ 3D artists and sales, but development is a one man show. So I’m responsible for a pretty absurd amount.

I also occasionally take on casual consulting gigs, which typically come about from my open source contributions. Currently I’m consulting for Berserk Games. I work on their Lua language bindings, public API documentation, networking and tooling for the (user content centric) game Tabletop Simulator (Unity/C#). I also help out their developer community with support, libraries, documentation and example projects i.e. developer advocacy.

Please do peruse my Github. I’m after something senior where I can take some ownership, but ideally also contribute across a breadth of projects/technologies.

Me: Okay. I'm just going to prototype a game. Don't want to get carried away. I won't even write a game engine. I'll use Tabletop Simulator.

Friend: Sounds good. How's it going?

Me: Well. I needed to be able to debug my code. https://github.com/tts-community/moonsharp-tts-debug

Friend: Oh, neat. So your game is done now?

Me: Not exactly. I had to had in matchmaking by reverse engineering Steam. https://github.com/SteamRE/SteamKit/pull/704

Friend: Ah. Alright. Can I play it now?

Me: Nah, I was finding it hard to maintain code. I wrote a Lua code bundler. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/luabundle

Friend: Sweet.

Me: Yeah, but I decided to integrate it into the official tooling. https://github.com/Berserk-Games/atom-tabletopsimulator-lua/...

Friend: I'm sure the community will be thankful.

Me: I hope so. I now run a small community of TTS developers. https://github.com/tts-community/

Friend: Right. You must be done by now.

Me: Nah, I couldn't statically type check my code. So I wrote some types. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/tts-types

Friend: Seems unnecessary for a prototype, but sure.

Me: I had to write my own IDE to use them though. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis

Friend: Right... So how'd the game going then?

Me: Oh, I'm not doing that anymore. I now consult for Berserk Games, developers of Tabletop Simulator

Friend: ...

Atom (most basic), Vscode with emmylua (debugging) and tabletop simulator lua, or Intellij with luanalysis (type safety). all are really good depending on your use case. I have never used the scripting window, even for simple scripts.