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Luau Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to luau
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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Avalonia
Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology
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Uno Platform
Open-source platform for building cross-platform native Mobile, Web, Desktop and Embedded apps quickly. Create rich, C#/XAML, single-codebase apps from any IDE. Hot Reload included! 90m+ NuGet Downloads!!
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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terra
Terra is a low-level system programming language that is embedded in and meta-programmed by the Lua programming language.
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nelua-lang
Minimal, efficient, statically-typed and meta-programmable systems programming language heavily inspired by Lua, which compiles to C and native code.
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Prosody IM
IMPORTANT: due to a drive failure, as of 13-Mar-2021, the Mercurial repository had to be re-mirrored, which changed every commit SHA. The old SHAs and trees are backed up in the vault branches. Please migrate to the new branches as soon as you can.
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source-build
A repository to track efforts to produce a source tarball of the .NET Core SDK and all its components
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better luau alternative or higher similarity.
luau discussion
luau reviews and mentions
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 2024-12-26.
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Lua Is So Underrated
Luau (developed by Roblox) is a fork of Lua 5.1 with some very significant improvements to speed and QoL. It also alleviates the nil-terminated array problem.
https://github.com/luau-lang/luau
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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
It does indeed still work that way! We even still support the old, in-house VM, known as LSO2: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSO
We're hard at work adding Luau (https://luau.org) as a supported language for both in-world scripting as well as client/viewer-side scripting. As a handy byproduct of that, LSL will also gain the ability to be compiled to Luau bytecode, allowing us to eventually (someday, at least) shed any need for our custom-patched version of Mono 2.6. More juicy details here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lua_FAQ
Source: I work at Linden Lab. If these sorts of things excite anyone, we're hiring!
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Pallene: A statically compiled companion language for Lua
I love Lua but I also prefer static types, so this looks great. I’ve used Luau[1] in the past which has gradual typing, but that’s less useful unless it’s enforced as a coding standard.
[1] https://luau-lang.org/
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Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws
>> the VM assumes that the bytecode was generated by the Luau compiler (which never produces invalid/unsafe bytecode)
To that end they have a basic bytecode verifier (only used in debug mode / asserts are enabled) that validates the compiler only outputs valid bytecode, and continuously fuzz the compiler to make sure those asserts can't be triggered. See https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/blob/0d2688844ab285af1ef52...
It's fairly robust (and Luau bytecode isn't _that_ complex,) but they made the right decision disallowing direct bytecode execution.
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You can now write React in Lua
For anyone interested:
Roblox's Luau: https://luau-lang.org/
> Luau is a fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua.
> Around 2006, Roblox started using Lua 5.1 as a scripting language for games. Over the years the runtime had to be tweaked to provide a safe, secure sandboxed environment; we gradually started accumulating small library changes and tweaks.
- An Introduction to Low-Latency Scripting for Game Engines
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Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically
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.
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Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
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/
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Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
If you need Lua but also type-safety, how about Luau [1] then?
[1] https://luau-lang.org/
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Lua Criticism Is Unwarranted
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 -
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Stats
Basic luau repo stats
70
4,458
9.1
4 days ago
luau-lang/luau is an open source project licensed under MIT License which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of luau is C++.
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