Although, we've since moved to having several distinct data structures which conceptually map to tables, but implementation and syntax-wise have differences (mostly for performance).
BTW Basis was a good idea, I remember reading about Nondeterministic replay is a big problem on platforms like ROS.
I’ll take a look at your thing, too!
How did you miss Lua? It has been available for decades and good SE practice is to evaluate alternatives before commiting to any techonology.
It's fascinating to see a commercial game whose source is easily read inside the application bundle, and all the modding opportunities it opens up. (It's written in Lua with LÖVE.) Balatro was one of the biggest games of last year, and I'm sure the tinkerability was a big catalyst to that - people porting it to obscure platforms and making mods to extend the game.
It's also really cool to see how the game handles all the different ecosystems it exists in (Steam, Game Pass, Apple, Android, Nintendo Switch…).
I've got a Nix derivation that ought to be able to run any version of the game in Linux. Now I just need to figure out why it crashes when opened in game mode.
All this is way more effort than just spending the $10 to get it to run in Steam natively, but it's more interesting this way.
Not sure I agree on that point. Balatro is a great game and the mainstream success is warranted, but my gut tells me that the technical implementation was not the catalyst for that. Sure, Lua’s portability could have led to the cross-platform popularity, but a mainstream gamer does not tinker with and mod Balatro at all.
Getting it to run in KDE was straightforward. I've gotta figure out why it instacrashes in SteamOS game mode.
Huh? I had to do zero extra work to run it on the steam deck.
In this case, I had the Game Pass version. It depends on a custom shared object `love.platform` that talks to Microsoft's cloud APIs to save/load your game and achievements. I used Gemini to write a bridge that implements all the `love.platform` calls in pure Lua, and then use the Linux build of LÖVE to run the game natively.
Works great in KDE. Crashes when launched from Steam. Haven't gotten to why yet.
[0]: https://codeberg.org/contextgarden/context
[1]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Introduction/Installation
Has anyone solved an ecosystem upgrade like this?
Many people still use 5.1 because that is already a complete language that works fine. Most people don't really need the new features. Plus if you stay on 5.1 you get compatibility with LuaJit and Luau so much better performance.
Now something that worry me is whenever you need to make an HTTP request or parse some JSON you need to go on a quest for a "library" on the Internet. It doesn't seems to have a (semi-)official "Extended Standard Library" I can quickly trust.
- [0] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=flua&apropos=0&sek...
For an extended standard lib, the closest thing is probably Penlight. https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight If you want async IO, sockets, etc, check out Luvit. https://luvit.io
Lua is really designed as an extension language but it’s such a nifty little language that sometimes you really wish you could use it in place of Python or Perl, which is why LuaJIT is so popular. But LuaJIT is really just one guy’s project. Its metaprogramming features are really nice and let you build some Lisp-style DSLs, and if you want full Lisp syntax you can drop in Fennel. If you’re just writing extension code you often don’t need a standard lib because it’s easier just to roll your own function to fill the gap.
Personally, I found it easier and quicker to just read the reference manual to learn the language. It’s small and simple enough that you shouldn’t have trouble getting up to speed if you have a couple other imperative languages under your belt. IMO metatables are much easier to work with than JavaScript’s prototype inheritance.
I agree with the sentiment though, I even gave a talk about this at Lua Workshop 2013 (https://www.lua.org/wshop13/Chapuis.pdf) around that issue. There are good reasons why several important but OS-specific features are not included in the core language. Discussion around a "blessed" extended standard library module arise from time to time but never lead anywhere.
The Lua community - at least the one around PUC Lua - is reasonably small and you can typically look at what active popular projects use to figure out the best libraries. The LuaRocks download count can be an indicator as well. But I agree this is still a problem.
Plenty of languages come with standard libraries that are more than sufficient for handling plenty of tasks.
I'm only just over halfway through but if I'm being honest, I can't offer much praise for the depth of the material or the treatment it's given: other authoritative volumes I've previously consulted (strangely, Mastering CMake comes to mind first among that cohort) were much more effective at communicating the underlying philosophies of construction and other unobvious practical realities of their subjects. Nevertheless, I do still value having a comprehensive reference at hand to refresh my memory on what's in fact possible when working with a language that I make use of as infrequently as this one.
> Fourth edition
> Programming in Lua
> by Roberto Ierusalimschy
> Lua.org, August 2016
> The fourth edition updates the book to Lua 5.3
That's huge. I wish LuaJIT adopted this, or at least added a compile time flag to enable it.
I don’t really follow LuaJIT too closely so I’m not sure if they’re even targeting Lua 5.4 let alone 5.5. I remember reading some GitHub issue that suggested some of the design decisions in Lua 5.4 wouldn’t really support LuaJIT goals re: performance.
With that said I’ve been enjoying Love2d even with Lua 5.1 features — as a hobbyist it works just fine for me.
Would certainly appreciate any corrections by those more in-the-know though!
This sounds like an offhand Youtube comment, I'm afraid. Underrated how? Its principal strength, easy embedding with the ability to work as an extension language, is well known in the circles where it matters. The authors never gave an impression that they'd aim to make it a language to bury all other scripting languages, which I find refreshing in the winner-take-all culture of programming language discussion. Lua is modest and works well for what it is. No need to go all grandiose.
> I just wish one of the mainstream browsers actually puts their foot down and starts supporting Lua as scripting language.
I sincerely hope not, that would be a very counterproductive dilution of effort. Browser authors already have their plate full with all other web platform problems.
Beside all the rabblerousing that it came from the same company as Chrome, there was a real concern about compatibility and spreading the platform too thin, if every engine had to maintain multiple VMs in parallel.
It seems like the only language browsers will ever have is JavaScript (although it's still up to us to decide how that language evolves over time).
That's directly contrary to what would make it acceptable as a web spec, compared to e.g. wasm being powerful enough to be a compile target that can support wasm.
Seems like an odd change, I wonder what the rationale is. Just making it clear to people new to the language that you can't adjust it mid-loop to change the loop count I guess?
The control variable in for loops is read only. If you need to change it, declare a local variable with the same name in the loop body.
Yes. The old code does an implicit "local x = x" for all loops, in case you modify 'x'. With the new semantics, the code only does it when you ask for it.
https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.3.5
The loop count was fixed at the start of the loop. One of the reasons for this was performance. For loops behave differently if the step count is positive or negative, and it's a bit faster to compute that once, before the loop, than to repeat it every iteration.
I haven't run into this myself, but it does make sense, and eliminating this footgun sounds like a good idea.
Truly is a shame, everything seems to have settled on 5.1 for the most part without ever being updated, or any intention of it being updated. Some really nice features post 5.1
I understand each version of Lua introduces breaking changes in the language, which isn't great as the language becomes fragmented (Or not really, once again 5.1 is pretty ubiquitous)
Not exactly. LuaJIT has backported various hot features from 5.2 and 5.3 as long as they're unlikely to break 5.1 code.
1. The luajit documentation basically just had a list of features. AFAIK there isn't any documentation that combines the 5.1 reference with luajit extensions (including things that were backported)
2. In some cases, for example Neovim, luajit extensions aren't guaranteed to be available. It just says there will be a lua runtime compatible with 5.1. Which means a truly portable neovim plugin can't use those extensions
3. There are features from later lua versions I would like to have (in particular <const> and <close>) that will probably never get backported.
4. Some features require luajit to be built with special flags
I think the real LuaJIT is strictly 5.1
Look at the Go homepage. Or Nim. (But not Rust sadly.)
In Lua you specify the “beginning” and “end” of the iteration, both included. It doesn’t work like in C, where you have an initialization and an invariant. What makes it short in C would make it longer in Lua, and viceversa.
You could argue “why not make loops like C”, then. But that can be extended to the limit: “why have a different language at all?”.
either way, at least you can't toggle between indexes starting at zero and one, (at least not that i can recall.)
[1] https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Question-about-LuaJIT-...
It’s worth noting that global is a reserved keyword now, so environments that had a ´global()´ function for escaping environments will now need to rename their helper function.