Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler

Re:Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler by timcameronryan on Wednesday October 26, 2011 @04:08PM (#3160193)

Hey all, I'm posting this to HN to see if there's any interest in a full-fledged JavaScript port to Lua. Colony right now is a proof-of-concept, but there might be a real use case out there for embeddable JavaScript where solutions like V8 would simply be too large.

Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tutorials of the Corona SDK (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/, a cross-platform mobile SDK that uses Lua) by programming CoffeeScript instead, which was surprisingly fun.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler by nieve on Wednesday October 26, 2011 @10:58PM (#3161438)

Interesting idea and possibly worth tossing out to the World of Warcraft addons/scripting community (single largest Lua end-user install base in the world, I believe) as well?

BTW, the name seems a bit tacky for a language developed in Brazil given the colonial history. Was there another reason for naming it that I've missed?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler by justincormack on Wednesday October 26, 2011 @05:10PM (#3160437)

Hmm, you could target iphone wax https://github.com/probablycorey/wax to make a coffescript dev environment for iOS. Wax is a really nice environment.

Using javascript as a language instead of Lua for scripting though seems odd, as Lua is pretty easy to use instead.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler by leafo on Wednesday October 26, 2011 @09:18PM (#3161218)

If you like CoffeeScript you should try out http://moonscript.org

CoffeeScript inspired syntax that compiles right to Lua.

[ Parent | on HN ]