We're considering adopting Luau for our project (a platform where users create games with cubes and Lua scripts). We're pretty happy with Lua already, but Luau brings type annotations and performance improvements while remaining backwards compatible with Lua 5.1.
Luau's been developped by Roblox, open sourced in 2020, and still mostly used by Roblox apparently.
Timing would be good for us if we decide to switch to Luau, but still, feedback from others who've been through the same Lua to Luau transition would be very helpful.
Any ideas? Are we crazy to even consider this?
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
#2Pretty sure Warframe uses it, too.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#3I 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?
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#4Factorio uses Lua script for both in-game and mod scripting: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Scripting
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#5World of Warcraft interface addons are made with Lua.
https://www.wowhead.com/guide/comprehensive-beginners-guide-...
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#6Factorio uses Lua script for both in-game and mod scripting: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Scripting
Yeah but OP is asking about transitioning from Lua to Luau
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#7I 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. I found myself writing more and more of it, and now I'm writing most of my code in it.
VS Code support is pretty good via the luau-lsp language server [2]. Type support for certain code patterns isn't great yet, but there are RFCs to improve this.
They're also quietly working on native code gen and JIT support, e.g. this PR from a few hours ago [3].
Overall, recommended! You're not crazy.
[1] https://twitter.com/kineticpoet
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#8Looking 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.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#9World of Warcraft interface addons are made with Lua. https://www.wowhead.com/guide/comprehensive-beginners-guide-...
That is Lua, not Luau. I noted the distinction in an earlier comment since I see I wasn't the only one here who wasn't aware.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau
#10Not 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?