Re:Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts (2012)
by monetus on Monday December 27, 2021 @07:12AM
(#29701846)
Have you seen TCL quadcode? It infers types and uses llvm - Check out the typing diagram; it is kind of crazy. Maybe it is to avoid shimmering more than anything, but I think it is impressive. Thought you might find it interestung even if you don't use TCL.
Back in the late 80s before Python and Lua were released the following decades, TCL made sense, as it was the only freely available embedable language.
Python's larger and more complete (and I'd argue a better language then Lua), but Lua's compact and very fast as it's a register-based bytecode VM (and luaJIT exists which is even faster) (although if you don't use the 'local' keyword on variables, it's then quite a bit slower as it no longer uses stack-based variables, so the code can end up being more verbose to make it fast), so games commonly used Lua for scripting/gameplay as it was easy to integrate.