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Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

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Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

#21

Post by Dekkonot »

aduermael wrote: post #20
Dekkonot wrote: post #19

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…

Thank you, very insightful! Yes, mobile is very important to us, so we ruled out LuaJIT anyway. 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!

I'm not sure about the garbage collection improvements since I haven't touched the GC, unfortunately. My philosophy is generally that I just let it do its work.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

#22

Post by implicit »

yannn wrote: post #15
sitkack wrote: post #10

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?

Good point, I don't know how hard transitioning back would be, we would need to review the language diff. Is it simple stuff like removing type annotations and reverting "i += 1" (Luau) by "i = i + 1" (Lua) ? I don't know if they have an interpreter only mode. Yes, our projet runs on WebAssembly. ( https://app.cu.bzh )

Luau also adds a continue keyword. It's probably the most troublesome thing you might encounter if you wanted to go from Luau back to Lua.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

#23

Post by boyned »

sitkack wrote: post #10

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?

Darklua can compile Luau to Lua 5.1: https://github.com/seaofvoices/darklua

Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

#24

Post by Heliodex »

boyned wrote: post #23
sitkack wrote: post #10

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?

Darklua can compile Luau to Lua 5.1: https://github.com/seaofvoices/darklua

Darklua is brilliant and works well for converting existing Lua projects to Luau for improved type safety as well as the reverse to convert existing Luau projects to Lua, allowing better compatibility. Unfortunately last I checked continue statements, if-then-else expressions, and interpolated strings weren't yet supported for conversion to Lua and still had open issues, which was a problem for a number of Luau libraries, though it's still resulted in an improvement in development experience for us.
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