Lua - what do you think of it?

Just listened to @rvirding’s interview here and he mentions #lua (and Luerl) - just wondered if anyone’s used Lua and what you think of it?

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Til there’s a Luerl.

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I think Lua is a fun language. They have managed to make it both powerful and simple, except for some shady bits, which is impressive. It is a bit too lenient scripting language, and of course it has mutable and shared and global data which is bad. :wink: :smile:

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I haven’t used it yet but it’s been on my radar. I’ve been using Neovim more recently, which uses Lua as an alternative to Vimscript for configuration and development of plugins. Additionally Hamerspoon uses it for scripting automations.

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I am mostly hearing about Lua as a way to embed scripting in your bigger engine / project but I am skeptical about it due to what @rvirding mentioned: global shared mutable data.

Stuff like LuaJIT however is very impressive. A seriously fast scripting language.

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I’ve used lots of lua, including luerl heavily whitelisted to handle specific runtime configurable processing tasks back in my erlang days. I’ve implemented the official lua as a scripting language a number of times, luajit as well, which is actually amazingly designed though a bit of hell to sandbox it well (you basically have to map all your calls then overwrite the mapping functions just to start with…). As for ‘using’ it, not much of that in comparison, I actually really hate the language itself for a large variety of reasons, lol, but it does make for a fast and low overhead scripting language.

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