Re:Luau goes open-source
by MaximumADHD on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @02:34PM
(#29098608)
To my understanding it’s not so much a fork of Lua as it is a complete rewrite in C++. They’ve created their own custom VM and everything. The closest version it has parity with is Lua 5.1.4, with a few compatible features from 5.2 and 5.3 backported.
The VM still has a lot of Lua 5.1 code. It's definitely a fork.
Re:Luau goes open-source
by spicybright on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @02:37PM
(#29098638)
Wow, now that's even more impressive.
Makes me wonder if there's anything useful to "upstream" to vanilla lua here, or if the VM deviated too far.
PUC-Rio's Lua doesn't take contributions anyway, right? It's open source but it's not an open project. Similar to.. uh.. nethack, at least how it used to be :)
There is also a Fennel[1] that builds a LISP on top of Lua.
Everybody's focusing on the type stuff, which is nice -- but luau also just performance better than Lua in a bunch of cases.
Arseny (from Roblox) has tweeted a bit about it. It's interesting to follow!
I don't know what this fork changes, but I love how many game engines will take lua and expand it to fit their exact needs like this.
Very few scripting languages make it as easy to do as lua.
This is an interesting related project:
https://moonscript.org/
It compiles down to lua, and really beefs everything up. Interface is super nice too. You just put `require "moonscript"` at the top of the file and you're done, now just write your code in moon script.