Re:Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter
by shadowgovt on Sunday June 29, 2025 @06:24PM
(#44417113)
I used Go awhile ago for a Blockly interpreter. It's remarkably friendly; if memory serves, the ability to attach metadata to structs was pretty useful.
One hack I'm not super proud of is I implemented return and break with panic / recover. Were I to do it all over, I'd probably use continuations to model that instead.
(Side-note on Lua specifically: among the reasons I like Lua is that it's very simple and its reference interpreter implementation is some very understandable code. I did some truly horrible things to it back in the day for a game engine, and it was very amenable to getting beat up like that).
One hack I'm not super proud of is I implemented return and break with panic / recover. Were I to do it all over, I'd probably use continuations to model that instead.
(Side-note on Lua specifically: among the reasons I like Lua is that it's very simple and its reference interpreter implementation is some very understandable code. I did some truly horrible things to it back in the day for a game engine, and it was very amenable to getting beat up like that).