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Does anyone genuinely like the language on its own merits? Lua is an excellent alternative to other interpreted langs like Python or JS.
Yes. Although it’s actually a very good alternative, it suffers from a lack of community. Its use can be increased with a global community and localized communities.
Lua is a super underrated language. The standard implementation is under 500kb and it can run almost anywhere. Including inside other programs and on embedded systems that dont even have an OS.
It is great for scripting things that do not need to run exceedingly fast, or are not exceptionally complex.
2D games? UI? Absolutely.
Even many subsystems of 3D games can be handled decently well. Procedurally populate a map with items, or generate some NPC populations or weapons or items based on mixxing and matching a bunch of preset components, throw some kind of event tracking and event driven system on top of already existing systems to give your world more depth and breadth.
But by the time you get to… trying to do an entire 3d render pipeline for graphics more complicated than roughly an N64 or PS1, all of your netcode in a conplex and fast paced game, an entire dynamic 3D physics engine with many active objects… try to to that in Lua, you’re probably not gonna have a good time.
At that point, as the Open MW devs have shown… you can technically stilluse Lua to do this, but you’ve gotta be running your Lua through LuaJIT, that essentially compiles the parts of the Lua code that need that speed into C, and then run it in C.
At that point, it arguably makes more sense to just… take those parts of the code and just actually, always, run them in C or C++ or Rust or something.
… But after saying all that, I do not mean to take away from what you are saying, which is that Lua is extremely flexble and absolutely does have a wealth of legitimate uses cases.
I don’t think luajit compiles lua to C and then compiles the C, that would be pretty silly. JIT compilers directly output machine code.
And as long as you can do something in a higher level language there’s no need to involve manual memory management or tracking ownership (rust)
Lua can be pretty fast, but not Lua itself but Luau runtimes or LuaJIT
I disagree. Those are faster but the standard lua implementation is actually super fast.
Since y’all love LUA so much, what’s it’s advantage over things like micropython?
Pain and suffering (aka an arrays base index is one)
World of Warcraft plugins and Awesome WM configs. There are some decent 2d game engines that use Lua too, like Love2d!
Wireshark dissector devs
Tarantool db users
Don’t forget the Silverbullet users.
Factorio modders
Don’t forget the one statistically to be enjoyers of war crimes.
Rimworld mod authors.
Balatro, gmod, srb2 modding.
You forgot computercraft players
Some features of the MediaWiki engine run on Lua, too!
Luanti (formerly Minetest) and LÖVE. Oh, and TIC-80
