Why I chose Lua for this blog

Post by kqr » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 3:57 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #65

ganamadaduun wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything web-facing, if it's not a static website delivered by a well-tested web server, happens in a high-risk environment. And doubly so, if, like in this case, stuff like custom cgi libraries are involved. One has to be either very confident in their skills to do that or very, very brave.

My point here is that if someone breaks your blog, they've broken your blog. The blast radius of that should be strictly limited. Obviously don't go rolling your custom CGI scripts on a server that also hosts your personal email - but these days we are spoiled for choice in terms of isolated hosting strategies for a blog. Heroku, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Fly.io, GitHub Pages, a $5/month VPS...

Post by kqr » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:06 AM UTC

DavidVoid wrote: post #50

WolfeReader wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1 indexes are only a difference from what you're used to. Lua was made by mathematicians, who of course wanted to address the first element as 1, the second element as 2, etc. 0-indexing makes sense in the context of C where the index operator is syntactic sugar for pointer arithmetic. In higher-level languages like C# and Python and others, it's pretty much just a leftover habit from C devs that we all got used…

And a lot of the time it makes the syntax more compact than it would be with 0-indexing. for i=1,#arr do foo(arr[i]) end I don't feel that strongly for or against either way of indexing though, they both have their pros and cons.

    for (0..$#arr) {
        foo(arr[$_])
    }

Post by shmerl » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:13 AM UTC

TheCycoONE wrote: post #59

Lua 5.1 to 5.2 was a fairly significant breaking change; one that has forked the community to this day with luaJIT never coming on board. 5.2 to 5.3 also broke things with the introduction of integers but mostly at the level of bindings. There is also very little included in terms of standard library and while luarocks exists many significant packages go abandoned. There are breaking language changes in the upcoming…

Post by pansa2 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:28 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #85

TheCycoONE wrote: post #59

Lua 5.1 to 5.2 was a fairly significant breaking change; one that has forked the community to this day with luaJIT never coming on board. 5.2 to 5.3 also broke things with the introduction of integers but mostly at the level of bindings. There is also very little included in terms of standard library and while luarocks exists many significant packages go abandoned. There are breaking language changes in the upcoming…

Why couldn't LuaJIT support both? Feels like a needless limitation imposed on all its users. I noticed this problem when making plugins for neovim.

Post by indigodaddy » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:45 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #6

soapdog wrote: post #2

Author of the blog here in case anyone has questions.

Why would you build your blog to fail if some article on it ever gets popular? The fact that the most hits you ever received was 50k in a week isn't relevant; a single important post could receive that in seconds. It basically costs nothing to pre-render a static site, which then serves several orders of magnitude faster. I'm confused why anyone would do it this way in this day and age.