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What is the reason that LuaJIT was never updated past Lua 5.1?
by shmerl 1y ago
What is the reason that LuaJIT was never updated past Lua 5.1?
- whyenot 1y agoAfter Mike Pall left (10 year ago, wow!), for all intents and purposes, development ground to a halt. https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Looking-for-new-LuaJIT-maintainers#google_vignette https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Looking-for-new-LuaJIT... I assume he's off somewhere with _why, questing for chunky bacon.
- shmerl 1y agoDoes it still lack maintainers today? Kind of surprising if no one picked it up when it's so actively used by major projects (like neovim and others). It blocks using more recent Lua for them.
- whyenot 1y agoMike Pall is still active occasionally, but there has been little development since 2017 and nobody else seems to have picked up the ball (but someone out there prove me wrong!).
- pansa2 1y ago> Kind of surprising if no one picked it up LuaJIT’s code is very complex and esoteric, I don’t think anyone other than Mike Pall has done any significant work on it.
- johnisgood 1y agoWhy would you want "recent" Lua? LuaJIT includes features from newer Lua versions (5.2 and 5.3), and more. See https://luajit.org/extensions.html https://luajit.org/extensions.html.
- krapp 1y agoThat's fine. Freezing it at 5.1 (with some extensions) makes it stable. Not every language needs to move at the neck-breaking speed of, say, Javascript, pulling in every trend and bad idea that comes along for the sake of staying hip and exploding with unnecessary complexity and bloat. We need small, simple, sane languages. If you want to use a more recent Lua version, of course that's available. If you want to use LuaJIT then you know exactly what you're dealing with and that there won't be any weird surprises in the future.
- pansa2 1y agoIIRC Mike Pall dislikes some features of newer versions, particularly 5.2’s _ENV.
- kragen 1y agoIt does support a number of features that are not in Lua 5.1, notably a JIT compiler and an FFI, as well as some features from PUC Lua 5.2. If you mean to ask why it hasn't broken compatibility with Lua 5.1, it's probably so it can keep existing LuaJIT code bases running.