Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#2Hey all, I'm posting this to HN to see if there's any interest in a full-fledged JavaScript port to Lua. Colony right now is a proof-of-concept, but there might be a real use case out there for embeddable JavaScript where solutions like V8 would simply be too large.
Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tutorials of the Corona SDK (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/, a cross-platform mobile SDK that uses Lua) by programming CoffeeScript instead, which was surprisingly fun.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#3Lua is a great language. I personally would rather go the other way and use Lua instead of JS in the browser.
This is cool though from a hacking perspective. Good work.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#4The fun thing about transpilers is that you can chain them together. Waiting to see some C stuff ported to Lua using Emscripten via JS.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#5Hey all, I'm posting this to HN to see if there's any interest in a full-fledged JavaScript port to Lua. Colony right now is a proof-of-concept, but there might be a real use case out there for embeddable JavaScript where solutions like V8 would simply be too large. Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tut…
Hmm, you could target iphone wax https://github.com/probablycorey/wax to make a coffescript dev environment for iOS. Wax is a really nice environment.
Using javascript as a language instead of Lua for scripting though seems odd, as Lua is pretty easy to use instead.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#6In which cases would anyone need:
- to write code in JS rather than in Lua;
- and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS?
Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#7The fun thing about transpilers is that you can chain them together. Waiting to see some C stuff ported to Lua using Emscripten via JS.
Perhaps the best way to write a transpiler so there's no bugs is to write two of them at the same time, i.e. in this case Lua-to-JS and JS-to-Lua. Maybe it's easier to catch bugs.
This mirrors the idea of writing a compiler for a new language in itself as soon as possible.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#8In which cases would anyone need: - to write code in JS rather than in Lua; - and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS? Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.
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Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#9In which cases would anyone need: - to write code in JS rather than in Lua; - and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS? Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.
Many C applications use Lua as an embedded scripting language. This program would be very useful if the developers of the application wanted to extend scripting support to Javascript (and compile-to-JS languages) without having to modify their C code.
Re: Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler
#10In which cases would anyone need: - to write code in JS rather than in Lua; - and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS? Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.
Many C applications use Lua as an embedded scripting language. This program would be very useful if the developers of the application wanted to extend scripting support to Javascript (and compile-to-JS languages) without having to modify their C code.
But if they are developers why would they not want to modify their own C code (to add an embeddable JS interpreter?)