The dev experience for lua is f-ing awful.
The language is small, but not “simple”; it’s stuck in 1985.
The tooling is nearly non-existent and the stuff that does exist is a joke.
The few libraries that exist are awful and barely maintained; the maintained libraries are maintained by neckbeards with a god-complex.
The community is “reimplementing everything by hand is the right way to do it AND ALSO you’re an idiot doing it wrong” toxic. There are a million good reasons why it’s only has a foothold in nginx and Roblox territory.
It’s not a joke to say that it’s f-ing terrible all the way around.
There are a LOT of tools with embedded Lua scripting capabilities.
Even "modern" languages often don't have features like first-class functions, closures, proper tail calls, etc that Lua has had for a very long time now. LuaJIT also trades blows with JS almost certainly making it the fastest or second-fastest dynamic language around.
There's a lot to like about the language (aside from array indexes starting at 1), but I think you are right about the ecosystem and probably right about most of community.
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
makes it look fairly slow, competing with Ruby, rather then JS.
https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-ja...
LuaJIT used to have a performance comparison page, but it was removed a couple years ago apparently. It shows that LuaJIT is an average of around 16x faster than standard Lua (geomean). Very impressive considering it was written by just one guy for years (Mike Pall) and even more impressive when you consider that the JIT is only around 0.5mb (compare that with v8 which comes in at somewhere around 28mb IIRC).
https://web.archive.org/web/20230605114058/http://luajit.org...
You have no idea.
> He removed LuaJIT
LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1
The benchmarks game shows Lua 5.4.7
From what I understand, LuaJIT was removed before Lua 5.2 was released, so that wasn't the reason.
https://luajit.org/extensions.html
LuaJIT supports most of the features of Lua versions after 5.1 with the major missing feature being 64-bit integers, but like modern JS JITs, it actually uses 31/32-bit ints internally most of the time. Even in Lua 5.4 code, you are using implicit rather than explicit ints 99% of the time.
I haven't run the code to see, but I'm willing to bet that you can copy all the current benchmark code into LuaJIT and it'll run just fine.
> You have no idea.
I know with certainty that deoptimizations were applied to at least some scripts. Here's three examples for Common Lisp, StandardML, and Haskell over some time.
https://zerf.gitlab.io/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Arc...
https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe...
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ajhc-0.8.0.4/src/example...
Here's a C example from Mike Pall (presumably the same guy who created LuaJIT) that also got the deopt treatment by Isaac Gouy.
https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe...
It's not a question of if this happens -- only if it affects Lua (I've never checked).
On that page, what words do you think support your claim "was removed before Lua 5.2 was released".
> I know with certainty
I made those code changes. I wrote de-optimized as a joke.
On typing, there's only a few main ones you need to worry about—strings, functions, tables and numbers. I don't think it does weird things like JS where it converts between them without asking. Luau adds some type hinting if it's a big point of concern but I haven't really looked into it much.
I know it’s probably and overreaction, but this was a compete non-starter for me.
https://typescripttolua.github.io/
I’m personally a fan of YueScript which is basically an evolution of MoonScript (but it’s not typed).
LuaJIT has ridiculously easy C interop.