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> It's too bad it doesn't have more widespread adoption, I think a lot of people could benefit from using it for the things it's good at. I think that's becaus
by adwn 6y ago
> It's too bad it doesn't have more widespread adoption, I think a lot of people could benefit from using it for the things it's good at.
I think that's because there aren't many things it's really good at. It excells at a niche – as a light-weight, easily embeddable scripting language – but is mediocre as a general-purpose programming language, because it's standard library is extremely spartan and lacks so many things you need on a day-to-day basis.
- jmiskovic 6y agoI disagree, there are many things it is great at. The language is well designed, with orthogonal features that complement each other. Coroutines and meta-tables are easy to understand and still powerful way to organize and control code base. You can actually learn it in a week, and hold all of the language in your head. A very valuable thing in my opinion. The code is very readable to beginners (unlike Perl, Haskell or APL). The interpreter is incredibly fast. Even non-JIT implementation is surprisingly fast. The LuaJIT FFI is so convenient that the difference between C/C++ libraries and Lua libraries almost disappear. There are cross-platform hosting frameworks that allow you to write and execute dynamic interpreted code on otherwise locked down platforms (Android, Switch, TVs...). I would say Lua lacks tooling and better organization of community. Biggest Lua communities were built around products that embed Lua like WoW, Roblox, Corona (now Solar2D).