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> What’s the dev experience actually like for serious Lua The dev experience for lua is f-ing awful. The language is small, but not “simple”; it’s stuck in 19

> What’s the dev experience actually like for serious Lua The dev experience for lua is f-ing awful. The language is small, but not “simple”; it’s stuck in 1985. The tooling is nearly non-existent and the stuff that does exist is a joke. The few libraries that exist are awful and barely maintained; the maintained libraries are maintained by neckbeards with a god-complex. The community is “reimplementing everything by hand is the right way to do it AND ALSO you’re an idiot doing it wrong” toxic. There are a million good reasons why it’s only has a foothold in nginx and Roblox territory. It’s not a joke to say that it’s f-ing terrible all the way around.

uamgeoalsk 1y ago
[flagged]
docandrew 1y ago
nginx and Roblox and redis and nmap and neovim and cryengine … the list goes on There are a LOT of tools with embedded Lua scripting capabilities.
giraffe_lady 1y ago
8 years of full time professional lua development experience here and unfortunately I agree with all of this. I use fennel when I can; it doesn't improve any of the library or tooling problems but it doesn't make them worse either and addresses several of the problems with the language semantics itself.
hajile 1y ago
Lua was designed in 1993. This was back when MS-DOS was still cutting edge and the 66MHz Pentium was cutting-edge consumer technology. Even "modern" languages often don't have features like first-class functions, closures, proper tail calls, etc that Lua has had for a very long time now. LuaJIT also trades blows with JS almost certainly making it the fastest or second-fastest dynamic language around. There's a lot to like about the language (aside from array indexes starting at 1), but I think you are right about the ecosystem and probably right about most of community.
- guenthert 1y ago
  MS-DOS was never cutting edge, but I came here because I wonder about the performance claims. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... makes it look fairly slow, competing with Ruby, rather then JS.
  - hajile 1y ago
    He removed LuaJIT from the benchmark opting to use the much slower Lua (Lua is used for small embedded stuff and LuaJIT is used for high-performance stuff with a popular recent example being the game Balatro). Here's the Vercel version which uses LuaJIT. I have no idea if the benchmarks were deoptimized by him (as he did to several language he thought "were too fast"). https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-javascript https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-ja... LuaJIT used to have a performance comparison page, but it was removed a couple years ago apparently. It shows that LuaJIT is an average of around 16x faster than standard Lua (geomean). Very impressive considering it was written by just one guy for years (Mike Pall) and even more impressive when you consider that the JIT is only around 0.5mb (compare that with v8 which comes in at somewhere around 28mb IIRC). https://web.archive.org/web/20230605114058/http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230605114058/http://luajit.org...
    - igouy 1y ago
      > I have no idea if … You have no idea. > He removed LuaJIT LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1 The benchmarks game shows Lua 5.4.7
      - hajile 1y ago
        > LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1 From what I understand, LuaJIT was removed before Lua 5.2 was released, so that wasn't the reason. https://luajit.org/extensions.html https://luajit.org/extensions.html LuaJIT supports most of the features of Lua versions after 5.1 with the major missing feature being 64-bit integers, but like modern JS JITs, it actually uses 31/32-bit ints internally most of the time. Even in Lua 5.4 code, you are using implicit rather than explicit ints 99% of the time. I haven't run the code to see, but I'm willing to bet that you can copy all the current benchmark code into LuaJIT and it'll run just fine. > You have no idea. I know with certainty that deoptimizations were applied to at least some scripts. Here's three examples for Common Lisp, StandardML, and Haskell over some time. https://zerf.gitlab.io/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Archive/alioth.debian.org/tracker/download.php/30402/411005/311777/3309/binary-trees.lisp https://zerf.gitlab.io/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Arc... https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe922a0fe1a65ee19c49cb262a1c41319575545/contributed-source-code/shootout/binarytrees/binarytrees.mlton-2.mlton#L9 https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe... https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ajhc-0.8.0.4/src/examples/BinaryTrees.hs https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ajhc-0.8.0.4/src/example... Here's a C example from Mike Pall (presumably the same guy who created LuaJIT) that also got the deopt treatment by Isaac Gouy. https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe922a0fe1a65ee19c49cb262a1c41319575545/contributed-source-code/shootout/partialsums/partialsums.gcc-3.gcc#L5 https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe... It's not a question of if this happens -- only if it affects Lua (I've never checked).

uamgeoalsk 1y ago

[flagged]

docandrew 1y ago

nginx and Roblox and redis and nmap and neovim and cryengine … the list goes on There are a LOT of tools with embedded Lua scripting capabilities.

giraffe_lady 1y ago

8 years of full time professional lua development experience here and unfortunately I agree with all of this. I use fennel when I can; it doesn't improve any of the library or tooling problems but it doesn't make them worse either and addresses several of the problems with the language semantics itself.

hajile 1y ago

Lua was designed in 1993. This was back when MS-DOS was still cutting edge and the 66MHz Pentium was cutting-edge consumer technology. Even "modern" languages often don't have features like first-class functions, closures, proper tail calls, etc that Lua has had for a very long time now. LuaJIT also trades blows with JS almost certainly making it the fastest or second-fastest dynamic language around. There's a lot to like about the language (aside from array indexes starting at 1), but I think you are right about the ecosystem and probably right about most of community.

guenthert 1y ago
MS-DOS was never cutting edge, but I came here because I wonder about the performance claims. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... makes it look fairly slow, competing with Ruby, rather then JS.
- hajile 1y ago
  He removed LuaJIT from the benchmark opting to use the much slower Lua (Lua is used for small embedded stuff and LuaJIT is used for high-performance stuff with a popular recent example being the game Balatro). Here's the Vercel version which uses LuaJIT. I have no idea if the benchmarks were deoptimized by him (as he did to several language he thought "were too fast"). https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-javascript https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-ja... LuaJIT used to have a performance comparison page, but it was removed a couple years ago apparently. It shows that LuaJIT is an average of around 16x faster than standard Lua (geomean). Very impressive considering it was written by just one guy for years (Mike Pall) and even more impressive when you consider that the JIT is only around 0.5mb (compare that with v8 which comes in at somewhere around 28mb IIRC). https://web.archive.org/web/20230605114058/http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230605114058/http://luajit.org...
  - igouy 1y ago
    > I have no idea if … You have no idea. > He removed LuaJIT LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1 The benchmarks game shows Lua 5.4.7
    - hajile 1y ago
      > LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1 From what I understand, LuaJIT was removed before Lua 5.2 was released, so that wasn't the reason. https://luajit.org/extensions.html https://luajit.org/extensions.html LuaJIT supports most of the features of Lua versions after 5.1 with the major missing feature being 64-bit integers, but like modern JS JITs, it actually uses 31/32-bit ints internally most of the time. Even in Lua 5.4 code, you are using implicit rather than explicit ints 99% of the time. I haven't run the code to see, but I'm willing to bet that you can copy all the current benchmark code into LuaJIT and it'll run just fine. > You have no idea. I know with certainty that deoptimizations were applied to at least some scripts. Here's three examples for Common Lisp, StandardML, and Haskell over some time. https://zerf.gitlab.io/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Archive/alioth.debian.org/tracker/download.php/30402/411005/311777/3309/binary-trees.lisp https://zerf.gitlab.io/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Arc... https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe922a0fe1a65ee19c49cb262a1c41319575545/contributed-source-code/shootout/binarytrees/binarytrees.mlton-2.mlton#L9 https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe... https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ajhc-0.8.0.4/src/examples/BinaryTrees.hs https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ajhc-0.8.0.4/src/example... Here's a C example from Mike Pall (presumably the same guy who created LuaJIT) that also got the deopt treatment by Isaac Gouy. https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe922a0fe1a65ee19c49cb262a1c41319575545/contributed-source-code/shootout/partialsums/partialsums.gcc-3.gcc#L5 https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe... It's not a question of if this happens -- only if it affects Lua (I've never checked).