luau VS referencesource

Compare luau vs referencesource and see what are their differences.

luau

A fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua (by luau-lang)

referencesource

Source from the Microsoft .NET Reference Source that represent a subset of the .NET Framework (by microsoft)
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luau referencesource
64 88
3,595 3,108
2.7% 0.8%
9.0 0.0
14 days ago 23 days ago
C++ 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.

luau

Posts with mentions or reviews of luau. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-11.
  • Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024
    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.

  • Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
    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/

  • Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    If you need Lua but also type-safety, how about Luau [1] then?

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

  • Lua Criticism Is Unwarranted
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Oct 2023
    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
  • Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2023
    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.

  • Embeddable Common Lisp 23.9.9
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2023
    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.
  • Creating a simple sandboxed language
    3 projects | /r/LLVM | 4 Jul 2023
    Luau - Lua variant by Roblox
  • The Warframe Lexicon for Updates
    1 project | /r/Warframe | 1 Jun 2023
    On a side note, I've heard that they recently switched from Lua to Roblox's own fork of Lua, Luau.
  • Lua: The Little Language That Could
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2023
    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

  • Scripting Resources MegaThread
    1 project | /r/ROBLOXStudio | 28 May 2023
    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

referencesource

Posts with mentions or reviews of referencesource. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-30.
  • Got my first c# software engineering job, any advice?
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 14 Jun 2023
    But to go deeper to .NET/CLR architecture is important too. Try to understand how it works inside. Use the source, Luke! https://source.dot.net/ https://referencesource.microsoft.com/ This source code vaults is not completed then try JetBrains dotPeek tool to look at any assembly source code.
  • The most obscure type in the System namespace
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 11 Jun 2023
    (https://github.com/Microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.ServiceModel/System/ServiceModel/MessageSecurityVersion.cs; scroll down to inner classes)
  • Why your F# evangelism isn't working
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 May 2023
    List is an IList/IReadOnlyList; these interfaces do nothing that couldn't be done right inside the file itself.

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    Instead we have to go diving through the IList, which implements ICollection, which implements IEnumerable, which implements IEnumerable (again). Just because each interface is composed of another interface, doesn't mean you aren't using inheritance. You are effectively creating a custom inheritance tree through willy-nilly composition.

    It is gratuitous to make this chain so deep, when the underlying code is just a handful of lines.

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The doc-strings are unnecessary. It's self-evident what most of the code does if you read it.

            // Returns an enumerator for this list with the given
  • How do I counter "Open source is less secure due to vulnerabilities being open too."?
    1 project | /r/opensource | 25 May 2023
    The whole .net framework source code is online.
  • Difference between String and StringBuilder in C#.
    1 project | /r/csharp | 7 May 2023
  • Best way to create two operators that differ only by one argument type and have the same numbers of arguments?
    1 project | /r/csharp | 13 Mar 2023
    https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.Numerics/System/Numerics/Vector2.cs https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.Numerics/System/Numerics/Vector2_Intrinsics.cs
  • Multi-Key Dictionary in C#
    2 projects | /r/dotnet | 31 Jan 2023
    .net itself has arbitrary interfaces, ex https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/mscorlib/system/action.cs
  • Ask HN: What book you recommend for advanced programming in C#?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2023
    Assuming if you are new to C# - start coding! And start reading https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csha...

    If you are not new to C#, start building an application end-to-end/a classic n-tier application, right from using a database, Entity Framework, WebAPI, DTO, AutoMapper, and a front-end (your choice - Angular/React/Vue with TypeScript or better yet - Blazor).

    You will not only understand & use dependency injection, reflection, LINQ, multi-threaded programming, generic programming, source-code generation, unit-testing - and much much more in a practical/real-world usage.

    Peruse https://referencesource.microsoft.com/ once in a while.

    Follow various team members of .NET Framework, C# team and the like on various social-media. https://mobile.twitter.com/i/lists/120961876

    I am sure there will be who agree / disagree with the above approach and will provide more viewpoints for you to consider.

    Enjoy - and strap yourself for an amazing journey or roller-coaster ride, however you want to call it!

  • FTP Web Request Question
    1 project | /r/csharp | 23 Jan 2023
    Maybe from the source of FtpWebRequest it is possible to track what the default behaviour is.
  • Get MimeType for .NET 6.0 Windows Forms program
    1 project | /r/csharp | 19 Nov 2022
    The class is just a very limited dictionary, a library will be the same or better.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing luau and referencesource you can also consider the following projects:

lua-languages - Languages that compile to Lua

.NET Runtime - .NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.

LuaJIT - Mirror of the LuaJIT git repository

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

moonsharp - An interpreter for the Lua language, written entirely in C# for the .NET, Mono, Xamarin and Unity3D platforms, including handy remote debugger facilities.

github1s - One second to read GitHub code with VS Code.

lua-language-server - A language server that offers Lua language support - programmed in Lua

CoreCLR - CoreCLR is the runtime for .NET Core. It includes the garbage collector, JIT compiler, primitive data types and low-level classes.

tl - The compiler for Teal, a typed dialect of Lua

CoreWCF - Main repository for the Core WCF project

moonscript - :crescent_moon: A language that compiles to Lua

ILSpy - .NET Decompiler with support for PDB generation, ReadyToRun, Metadata (&more) - cross-platform!