terra VS Lua

Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

Terra is the language you're looking for: https://terralang.org/

Wow, amazing stuff. I love Lua, it was how I learned programming as a kid. Coincidently from the same world as the author. Open Tibia.

The author made a custom client (https://github.com/edubart/otclient) for the game that is still very much in active use by thousands of players. He's a very skilled developer.

Great to see AOT typed Lua, I know of the other solutions: Luau, Teal, TypeScriptToLua, Terra, etc., but this one is my favorite so far.

Love the simple compilation to C (and WASM support via Emscripten). Though Terra's JIT is enticing and good replacement for LuaJIT, this is for embedded systems, it's a good replacement for Lua PUC-Rio.

The World:

- https://luau-lang.org/

- https://terralang.org/

- https://github.com/teal-language/tl

- https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Terra is a language that can also do that, and uses Lua as the metaprogramming language. Types are just Lua values.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of work left kind of half-baked so using the language is a pain... if someone invested a lot of time to make Terra work properly and added some tooling around it, wrote proper docs and so on, it would be a really interesting language.

https://terralang.org/

(I am slightly familiar with a language called Terra (https://terralang.org), which couples C with Lua, where the Lua is basically used as the metaprogramming layer ... sort of like comptime in Zig. And making an SOA data structure is the kind of thing you could do in Lua in Terra. So that was partly the basis for my question).

> why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean

If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems.

> write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...)

You want https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?

The EventSource uses the Lua language to search for any services with ports set to 80 or 443 in the ‘argocd’ namespace. More examples can be found here.

If you're new to the 12 in 24 series, I'm learning and building projects with a new programming language every month - this month, it's the Lua scripting language. You can find source code for the projects I build in the official GitHub repository (check it out, this week's folder contains code for both this and two other bonus projects!).

This month, we're talking about Lua. It's not always a first choice when it comes to programming, but I think there's a lot to enjoy about this little language. Heck, I'm a big game development fan myself - I would look into it even if that was the only reason to.

It’s Portuguese. It’s the same in the Lua codebase [1].

[1]: https://github.com/lua/lua

If we think we need more flexibility for processing records, we can write our own embedded filters using Lua language. Lua is a highly efficient programming language used mainly for embedded scripting.

Lua

➜ ~ brew info lua ==> lua: stable 5.4.6 (bottled) Powerful, lightweight programming language https://www.lua.org/ /opt/homebrew/Cellar/lua/5.4.6 (29 files, 788.7KB) * Poured from bottle using the formulae.brew.sh API on 2023-05-16 at 11:03:06 From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/l/lua.rb License: MIT ==> Caveats You may also want luarocks: brew install luarocks ==> Analytics install: 16,599 (30 days), 56,745 (90 days), 139,027 (365 days) install-on-request: 1,763 (30 days), 6,266 (90 days), 21,105 (365 days) build-error: 0 (30 days)

I think Lua is a good example of doing documentation well. The source code is commented only as much as needed, mainly with brief comments about things that might not be obvious and a small number of longer explanations of how the architecture works (mainly relevant to developers). It also has a super nice feature that's surprisingly rare: each file has a very short line at the top that describes what the file is, so you don't have to guess based on the filename alone. The API is documented in a single HTML file on the website that has both the high level descriptions of the language and architecture, as well as documentation for each public-facing function. The docs are maintained by hand, but the API is mostly stable, so the docs don't need to change very often.

This is using the Lua language and the Solar2d game framework