5 ms·

Cloudflare In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's exist

Cloudflare In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's existence and it's only been in the last couples of years they have begun to use Rust. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

hammertime23 3y ago
and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.
- norir 3y ago
  Your opinion is not universal.
  - astorjhans 3y ago
    [flagged]
- alberth 3y ago
  > "LuaJIT is a cool thing. Helped us a lot. But not everything remains the right thing forever." Posted only 11 months ago by Cloudflare CTO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32869567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32869567 Cloudflare was already operating a scale and as public company, when they were running LuaJIT. Chances that you'll operate at Cloudflare scale is like 1:Billion. Sounds like Cloudflare was quite happy with LuaJIT.
  - savefce77 3y ago
    Of course they would. It’s called saving face. They got lucky, choosing a niche language and a massive amount of tech debt as their primary technology stack. But in the end, Cloudflare is one company. Who gives a what they did?
    - imtringued 3y ago
      I don't know about you but a 3x performance increase going from a scripting language with fast iteration times to a programming language that has long compilation times plus a borrow checker is hardly worth the risk of a rewrite to the average company. Add on top the fact that one of the performance problems was interfacing nginx with luajit, aka there are two unnecessary memory copies. When I think about these things, I'm thinking cloudflare was lucky enough to outgrow lua rather than being lucky to have gotten away with luajit.
- toastercat 3y ago
  I like Lua the language, but why is it and LuaJIT terrible to work with in your experience?
  - genter 3y ago
    I haven't looked at LuaJIT, but Lua is written in this weird bastard language using the C preprocessor. All of the terseness of Lisp, with no type system (since it's the C preprocessor), and the added fun of pointer arithmetic.
    - sctb 3y ago
      Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm perusing the source to try to make sense of this comment and all I see is... C.
      - genter 3y ago
        Literally any header file in https://github.com/lua/lua https://github.com/lua/lua In particular, https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/ldo.h https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/ldo.h
        alberth 3y ago
        Are you referring to Lua, the language? Or its implementation details (written in C)? If the later, how does that make Lua, the language, bad?
        genter 3y ago
        I'm criticizing the implementation. I have no complaints about the language (other than arrays starting at 1). I'm just salty because other people have said the implementation was really clean C, so I decided to spend a week porting it to C#, and I gave up. I could not figure out how closures were actually implemented, and I spent a day trying to understand it.
    - 3y ago

hammertime23 3y ago

and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.

norir 3y ago
Your opinion is not universal.
- astorjhans 3y ago
  [flagged]
alberth 3y ago
> "LuaJIT is a cool thing. Helped us a lot. But not everything remains the right thing forever." Posted only 11 months ago by Cloudflare CTO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32869567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32869567 Cloudflare was already operating a scale and as public company, when they were running LuaJIT. Chances that you'll operate at Cloudflare scale is like 1:Billion. Sounds like Cloudflare was quite happy with LuaJIT.
- savefce77 3y ago
  Of course they would. It’s called saving face. They got lucky, choosing a niche language and a massive amount of tech debt as their primary technology stack. But in the end, Cloudflare is one company. Who gives a what they did?
  - imtringued 3y ago
    I don't know about you but a 3x performance increase going from a scripting language with fast iteration times to a programming language that has long compilation times plus a borrow checker is hardly worth the risk of a rewrite to the average company. Add on top the fact that one of the performance problems was interfacing nginx with luajit, aka there are two unnecessary memory copies. When I think about these things, I'm thinking cloudflare was lucky enough to outgrow lua rather than being lucky to have gotten away with luajit.
toastercat 3y ago
I like Lua the language, but why is it and LuaJIT terrible to work with in your experience?
- genter 3y ago
  I haven't looked at LuaJIT, but Lua is written in this weird bastard language using the C preprocessor. All of the terseness of Lisp, with no type system (since it's the C preprocessor), and the added fun of pointer arithmetic.
  - sctb 3y ago
    Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm perusing the source to try to make sense of this comment and all I see is... C.
    - genter 3y ago
      Literally any header file in https://github.com/lua/lua https://github.com/lua/lua In particular, https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/ldo.h https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/ldo.h
      - alberth 3y ago
        Are you referring to Lua, the language? Or its implementation details (written in C)? If the later, how does that make Lua, the language, bad?
        genter 3y ago
        I'm criticizing the implementation. I have no complaints about the language (other than arrays starting at 1). I'm just salty because other people have said the implementation was really clean C, so I decided to spend a week porting it to C#, and I gave up. I could not figure out how closures were actually implemented, and I spent a day trying to understand it.
  - 3y ago