It's not just for games. One of the best Jabber/XMPP servers is written in Lua:
Why isn't everyone using Lua?
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Re: Why isn't everyone using Lua?
#12There's a pretty slick Redis implementation at http://antirez.com/post/scripting-branch-released.html - I've been meaning to check it out for some real world usage. Mostly I've seen it in Warcrack.
Re: Why isn't everyone using Lua?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have a lot of experience with Python, is it as easy to call out from and into c code as with Lua? (I am now just guessing as to why a game programmer would choose Lua over Python).
lua is easier to embed, is smaller, and has better performance. it's also a slightly cleaner language (all other things being equal, i think it is slightly better than python: the handling of tables is more regular; it has better support for continuations; it has tco; and correct scoping). on the downside, the "maps as arrays" approach is a bit clumsy.
Lua tables are sort of two-headed beasts. They aren't like PHP's array construct, which is effectively always an ordered dict. In Lua, an ordered list and a dictionary are both expressed by the same type, but are effectively different types. You can even have both an ordered list, and a dictionary in the same table.
foo = {1,2,3}
foo = {foo = "bar", baz = "bin"}
This is somewhat unintuitive in the context of other similar languages, but once you have a grasp of it, it makes a lot of sense, and is remarkably elegant.
Re: Why isn't everyone using Lua?
#14Lua is a wonderful language. Small, terse, extremely powerful, easily embedded, and fast. I'm a huge fan of it.
It does suffer from the lack of a robust standard library, because it is intended to be embedded, where it should inherit the majority of its functionality from the host application. That said, when embedded in a rich host environment, it's a marvelous tool.
Re: Why isn't everyone using Lua?
#15I just disagree with the 1-based indexing...