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The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

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Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#41
post #25

Wish there is newer LuaJIT to leverage the new Lua features, but then maybe those new features are not really that critical.

LuaJIT is in somewhat active development, with 40 commits so far this year, although these are mostly bug fixes (some for bugs introduced by LLVM). The main new feature, if you can call it that, is "suport for Apple hardened runtime."

LuaJIT is also stuck at Lua 5.1 (by choice) while the latest is Lua 5.4, with 5.5 on the way.

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#42
I was thinking a while back, how nice it would be if lua was the scripting language in the browser instead of javascript. There are some projects to compile lua to wasm and have it run in the browser...

https://pluto-lang.org/web/#env=lua%3A5.4.6&code=if%20_PVERS...

But interoperability with the DOM is the missing key.

Still, if lua was used instead of javascript, I could see myself saying... man, I wonder what browser development would be like if we replaced lua with x.

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#43

My only context in using Lua is my neovim configuration, does any know of any good books or tutorials that make something more advance using only lua? Anything of note to consider/read/watch?

Shameless plug time: I have written a public domain book which looks at using Lua (Lua 5.1 but the code works in newer versions as well as Lua 5.1/Luau/LuaJIT) as a text parsing engine. The book assumes familiarity with other common *NIX scripting languages (such as AWK, Perl, or Python) and goes over in detail the pain points for people coming from a *NIX scripting background: https://maradns.samiam.org/lunacy/SamDi…

Thanks for recommendation and writing the book! I'm reading the introduction, it doesn't answer why you chose to fork lua and create lunacy. What were you trying to solve with lunacy that lua couldn't do?

The TOC looks great, I will read this soon. Need to finish "Debugging CSS" first (another good book IMO).

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#45

My only context in using Lua is my neovim configuration, does any know of any good books or tutorials that make something more advance using only lua? Anything of note to consider/read/watch?

Don't have tutorials or books, but I've had a ton of fun using Lua with LOVE2D [0] for gamedev, and also Redbean [1] for building super small portable web applications. Earlier this year, I built a mini CMS [2] inspired by rwtxt with Redbean. [0] https://love2d.org/ [1] https://redbean.dev [2] https://github.com/kevinfiol/beancms

Haven't heard of love2d but have heard of pico-8. I've avoided most game dev tutorials because they seem overly focused on beginners, which is fine, but want to find more advance materials that assume the reader knows some basics.

Maybe I should reconsider and dive more into game dev.

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#46
post #41
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LuaJIT is in somewhat active development, with 40 commits so far this year, although these are mostly bug fixes (some for bugs introduced by LLVM). The main new feature, if you can call it that, is "suport for Apple hardened runtime."

LuaJIT is also stuck at Lua 5.1 (by choice) while the latest is Lua 5.4, with 5.5 on the way.

You say that as if Lua 5.3 and 5.4 were better than Lua 5.2 (which LuaJIT has support for most of the new features of) or 5.1, rather than merely newer. But programming languages don't decay like your teeth.

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless plug time: I have written a public domain book which looks at using Lua (Lua 5.1 but the code works in newer versions as well as Lua 5.1/Luau/LuaJIT) as a text parsing engine. The book assumes familiarity with other common *NIX scripting languages (such as AWK, Perl, or Python) and goes over in detail the pain points for people coming from a *NIX scripting background: https://maradns.samiam.org/lunacy/SamDi…

Thanks for recommendation and writing the book! I'm reading the introduction, it doesn't answer why you chose to fork lua and create lunacy. What were you trying to solve with lunacy that lua couldn't do? The TOC looks great, I will read this soon. Need to finish "Debugging CSS" first (another good book IMO).

The main reason I made Lunacy was to have a standard compile of Lua 5.1, since it’s possible to make a Lua 5.1 compile with, say 32-bit floats or which only supports integers but not floats.

Lunacy also has a few built in libraries which are not included with Lua 5.1, such as binary bitwise operations (and/or/xor). It also fixes some security issues with Lua 5.1 (better random number generator, hash compression algorithm which is protected from hash flooding attacks).

In addition, I have made a tiny Windows32 binary of Lunacy.

Don’t worry about the Lunacy changes; all of the examples in the book work with bog standard Lua 5.1 with a bit32 library (bit32 is common enough most OSes with a Lua 5.1 package also have a bit32 package for Lua 5.1).

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#48
post #23
post #8

It is interesting that so many of the largest languages were developed in a couple year time frame in the early-mid 90s. Python, Javascript, Java, Lua, R. All of these were developed 91-95 and make a bulk of development today.

I think that's an illusion. The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under th…

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Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#49
post #23
post #8

It is interesting that so many of the largest languages were developed in a couple year time frame in the early-mid 90s. Python, Javascript, Java, Lua, R. All of these were developed 91-95 and make a bulk of development today.

I think that's an illusion. The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under th…

Why do you write your years with a leading zero?

Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

#50
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an illusion. The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under th…

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