Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts

• luau

  64 3,595 9.0 C++

  A fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua

  

It is nice small, so Lua even ran on Playstation 3 SPU!

We used to ship lua binaries for the premake build system.

For me, the indexed from 1 rather than 0 is a big turn off.

Roblox has the mlua fork, https://github.com/Roblox/luau

• lua-cmake

  1 26 10.0 CMake

  Embed lua with CMake

Lua is a very nice piece of technology. Its source code is pretty easy to get into, the documentation is complete.

It has its quirks yes, but if I need to add scripting to a software, I'd consider Lua before considering writing a DSL, simply because you can pretty much embed Lua's source in your C/C++ software as a static library[0].

The stack-based approach makes it so easy to interact with C/C++, and I've been looking at the Rust bindings[1] recently out of curiosity, looks promising.

  [0] - https://github.com/lubgr/lua-cmake

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• rlua

  13 1,676 8.2 Rust

  High level Lua bindings to Rust

  

[1] - https://github.com/amethyst/rlua/blob/master/examples/guided_tour.rs

• mlua

  17 - -

I believe mlua [0] is the recommended Lua Rust binding now.

[0] https://github.com/khvzak/mlua

• piccolo

  6 1,248 8.9 Rust

  An experimental stackless Lua VM implemented in pure Rust (by kyren)

  

• gopher-lua

  7 6,005 4.9 Go

  GopherLua: VM and compiler for Lua in Go

• fengari

  24 1,765 0.0 JavaScript

  🌙 φεγγάρι - The Lua VM written in JS ES6 for Node and the browser

  

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• moonsharp

  4 1,360 0.0 C#

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

  

• lua-lockbox

  2 341 3.3 Lua

  A collection of cryptographic primitives written in pure Lua

• lanarts

  1 1 0.0 C++

  lanarts is an open source RPG that attempts to play like a real-time rogue-like

I looked at many options, what I lacked when I looked in this space is a big comparable project to, say, my game engine https://github.com/lanarts/lanarts that uses one of these typed Lua's. I'm not in a position where I can spend the time being the first - typescript has very mature idioms for large code bases

Suggest a related project