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I was on a team that used Lua in production on tens of thousands of machines running 24/7. The Lua interpreter was the weak link in the system, requiring at lea

I was on a team that used Lua in production on tens of thousands of machines running 24/7. The Lua interpreter was the weak link in the system, requiring at least daily restarts. Squashed so many bugs over the years, and still found more and more all the time. What I'm saying is, the Lua interpreter itself is flawed and I can't imagine using it as a runtime if I had the chance to avoid it. That said, the language was fun and fast and got the job done. The interpreter could use some work.

77pt77 9y ago
Ever used luaJIT?
- PatentTroll 9y ago
  No, I think we played around with it but decided to stick with the known quantity of the mainline interpreter, 'devil you know' and all. Because the types of bugs we found were not readily apparent at first, the types of things that would only manifest in statistics accords thousands of machines on 24/7, so pushing a new interpreter out was seen as too risky
worrydream 9y ago
This page lists every known bug in the Lua interpreter for the last 14 years, along with its fix: https://www.lua.org/bugs.html https://www.lua.org/bugs.html The average is 8 bugs per year, most fairly obscure. Every Lua release fixes all known bugs. Roberto, the chief architect, is kind of fanatical about quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU5QNKpATxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU5QNKpATxk I do not believe the interpreter is as flawed as you claim.
- lifthrasiir 9y ago
  I think Lua interpreter itself is fairly stable. But the problem is that it lacks the proper mechanism for language upgrade or deprecation---for example we have found a (undocumented) bug affecting Lua 5.1.x which has been silently fixed in 5.2, but we were stuck at 5.1 so we had to fork the interpreter. That kind of things. The development process of Lua is definitely flawed in my humble opinion.
- haberman 9y ago
  Agreed. In my experience it is extremely solid code. I haven't come across anything that I could imagine leading to a need for daily restarts. And I speak as someone who reported one of the bugs on their bugs page.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- PatentTroll 9y ago
  Well, this was a few years ago to be fair, and we probably had one of the largest and most intensive Lua deployments in production at that time, if I had to guess. I'm just reporting my experience then, which is just what I experienced. I'm glad to hear that maybe it's better now, and I very much appreciate the hard work and dedication of the developers behind it!

77pt77 9y ago

Ever used luaJIT?

PatentTroll 9y ago
No, I think we played around with it but decided to stick with the known quantity of the mainline interpreter, 'devil you know' and all. Because the types of bugs we found were not readily apparent at first, the types of things that would only manifest in statistics accords thousands of machines on 24/7, so pushing a new interpreter out was seen as too risky

worrydream 9y ago

This page lists every known bug in the Lua interpreter for the last 14 years, along with its fix: https://www.lua.org/bugs.html https://www.lua.org/bugs.html The average is 8 bugs per year, most fairly obscure. Every Lua release fixes all known bugs. Roberto, the chief architect, is kind of fanatical about quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU5QNKpATxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU5QNKpATxk I do not believe the interpreter is as flawed as you claim.

lifthrasiir 9y ago
I think Lua interpreter itself is fairly stable. But the problem is that it lacks the proper mechanism for language upgrade or deprecation---for example we have found a (undocumented) bug affecting Lua 5.1.x which has been silently fixed in 5.2, but we were stuck at 5.1 so we had to fork the interpreter. That kind of things. The development process of Lua is definitely flawed in my humble opinion.
haberman 9y ago
Agreed. In my experience it is extremely solid code. I haven't come across anything that I could imagine leading to a need for daily restarts. And I speak as someone who reported one of the bugs on their bugs page.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
PatentTroll 9y ago
Well, this was a few years ago to be fair, and we probably had one of the largest and most intensive Lua deployments in production at that time, if I had to guess. I'm just reporting my experience then, which is just what I experienced. I'm glad to hear that maybe it's better now, and I very much appreciate the hard work and dedication of the developers behind it!