tengo VS gopher-lua

> 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).

Would be neat to see graph of recent versions with linear scale

I checked, they use switch on opcodes in vm.go. So would expect a recent improvement, but probably only <5%, & I didn't look close enough to see if awk is one of those languages where instruction dispatch matters less (like how APL tends to avoid issues since array ops avoid having dispatch in tight loops, or how Python avoids instruction dispatch overhead when using numpy)

For VMs Go had a problem for large switch statements: it would always use binary search instead of a jump table. This caused gopher-lua & go-lua to both take the route of having an array of functions which they call on to dispatch instead

A couple years ago this was fixed: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/357330

I measured a small perf improvement switching gopher-lua to switch: https://github.com/yuin/gopher-lua/pull/479

Not the parent but there are several high quality native (meaning no CGO) Lua implementations for Go and it's a great choice if you want an embedded scripting language:

https://github.com/yuin/gopher-lua

The "game" was just an example, what I'm exactly trying to do is creating a plugin system for my go app using gopher-lua. The thing is the app will be used by end users and I can't ask them to install libraries. ATM, I don't care about libs with external dependencies like openssl, zlib etc. supporting just the pure Lua ones is enough

I'm generally using Visual Studio Code for all my development. Really like it.

I chose https://github.com/yuin/gopher-lua as the Lua engine because it is Golang-based, while the Nginx Lua VM is C, unless I'm mistaken. Using gopher-lua is just easier when I'm working in a Golang project. I only have to work in a single language and dev environment for all the backend work. Makes both development and testing easier.

Moonscript I might have heard of, but I have no experience with it. I did not consider it here, and I would rarely consider any niche scripting language for a solution I want others to use. It just introduces an unnecessary barrier to adoption.

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