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edit: Nitter link for convenience https://nitter.net/petrih3/status/1532738882030260225
Grimrock/Druidstone devs (Almost Humand Ltd. / Ctrl alt ninja -- mostly the same people) switched their custom engine to Luau https://twitter.com/petrih3/status/1532738882030260225 edit: Nitter link for convenience https://nitter.net/petrih3/status/1532738882030260225
Looking at other replies here, I can see I wasn't the only one who didn't realize there is Lua and Luau. Luau is an extension of Lua: https://luau-lang.org/ > Luau is syntactically backwards-compatible with Lua 5.1 (code that is valid Lua 5.1 is also valid Luau); however, we have extended the language with a set of syntactical features that make the language more familiar and ergonomic.
I use Luau in my games and tools [1], and I recommend it. While I can't speak to transitioning to it from Lua, since I didn't do that, I can say that it's fast, stable, sandboxing just works (important for your use case), and it's very well supported and regularly updated. For context, I first started using Luau as an experimental hack by integrating it with Unity. I mostly just wanted fast and simple hot reloading.…
Thanks for the links, I'll check them out later today!
Not crazy. Sounds like a good idea given your used case. Is there a transpired from Luau to Lua? Otherwise you could never go back, you would eventually be forced to use their run time. Do they have an interpreter only mode? Can you run on web assembly?
I don't know if they have an interpreter only mode.
Yes, our projet runs on WebAssembly. (https://app.cu.bzh)
Pretty sure Warframe uses it, too.
I don't know, but am bored so looked into it. From looking at the Github repo's contributors, forks, etc it doesn't look like it. ChatGPT says it isn't used outside of Roblox, but google found this cross-dev game framework that has their own variant they've started: giderosmobile.com. But Google doesn't show anyone else?
Gideros is an interesting case, seems like they already added / modified features while using Lua and had to replicate those changes supporting their own version of Luau.
Personally, I would prefer to stick with regular Luau to benefit from regular improvements and be able to contribute back to the project eventually.
I would generally recommend Luau over Lua in most cases. If you don't need the simplicity that Lua provides (C is a lot easier to compile than C++), there's no contest to me, especially for game development.
LuaJIT is great, but if you plan to ship to mobile or console, you can't use JIT. You could use its FFI library, but that's the only real advantage.
Luau, however, has a bunch. Its interpreter as often as fast as LuaJIT's interpreter (without JIT), it's improved weekly with a variety of optimizations, and you have a killer feature: native vectors. For game development or heavy math code, that's a really big deal because it means vectors live directly on the stack and aren't garbage collected, making them very fast. Luau also has some very nice QOL and of course type checking.
There's some disadvantages, mind you. The most notable one is that as far as I'm aware all tooling for Luau comes from Roblox users. The Luau LSP extension someone linked earlier, as an example, is developed by a Roblox user. Luau also doesn't implement tailcalls, which might matter to you. I forget the reasoning but it was mostly a UX thing.
There's also no native integers and there probably won't ever be. LuaJIT and Lua 5.3+ have support for 64-bit integers but Luau doesn't, since they have complicated semantics if you want them to be first class citizens and a lot of Luau users are children.
I'm rather biased because I am a Roblox dev who's also contributed to Luau and its tooling environment. I would generally recommend Luau over Lua in most cases. If you don't need the simplicity that Lua provides (C is a lot easier to compile than C++), there's no contest to me, especially for game development. LuaJIT is great, but if you plan to ship to mobile or console, you can't use JIT. You could use its FFI libr…
I've read that garbage collection has been improved in Luau, can we know now exactly when the last reference on a table is lost? It's not critical, but would simplify in things for us in a few situations.
Thanks again!