Terra: A low-level counterpart to Lua

Re:Terra: A low-level counterpart to Lua by andrewmcwatters on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @12:51PM (#10657340)

You can cover literally the first two things with LuaJIT. Point three covers the fact that it can be used as "a stand-alone low-level language." So really, the only "advantage" this software has is that it is a different language. That's not an advantage on its own.

If you're using Lua to not use Lua, you never wanted to use Lua to begin with!

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Re:Terra: A low-level counterpart to Lua by vbit on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @07:51PM (#10660090)

> You can cover literally the first two things with LuaJIT.

Not at all. You don't have explicit control over generating machine code in LuaJIT. OTOH all Terra functions - whether dynamically generated or pre-written - will get compiled to machine code via LLVM. So it's explicit, i.e. more work, but more predictable. Arguably Terra code generation will cover more scenarios - consider some code paths may not be JITable at all by LuaJIT (due to NYI) but if you can generate a Terra function, you're guaranteed machine code.

> If you're using Lua to not use Lua, you never wanted to use Lua to begin with!

You're using Lua as a meta-programming language for Terra. If you know Lua, it could be a lot more convenient than using custom or archaic meta-programming languages.

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