Lua is not your average scripting language. It is small, fast, portable, and embeddable. These cornerstones of the language make it well-suited in many facets of the software industry, including embedded devices, video games, and even web applications. The language has been embraced by NASA, Adobe, NGINX, and Mozilla–to name a few. As more people realize the power and ease of using Lua, and industries like IoT and smart machines expand, we believe more companies (and individuals) will be embracing this language.

No Matter If I Use Lua Stand-alone Or Embedded In A C-Programming Environment, Underlying It Will Always Use C-Code? C Is Ordinarily A Compiled La...
Lua Is An Interpreted Language Or As The Wiki Informally Puts It A 'software Processed' Language. Lua Is Compiled Into Byte Code (not To Be Confuse...
See Full List On Codeproject.com
Extending A C++ Application With Lua 5.2 - CodeProject

Lua is not a new language. It has been around since the early 1990s and has demonstrated continued growth year after year in various software disciplines. As a small language comprising less than 10,000 lines of C code, Lua is extremely stable and virtually bug-free. Its authors are committed to keeping the language simple and performant, and the language’s slow and steady development cycle underscores this commitment.

Jun 15, 2015 These two views of Lua (as an extension language and as an extensible language) correspond to two kinds of interaction between C and Lua. In the first kind, C has the control and Lua is the library. The C code in this kind of interaction is what we call application code. In the second kind, Lua has the control and C is the library. This is an interesting tip. It shows the recipe for writing a DLL in native C/C can be called from Lua. Warning you'll need to be comfortable with low level C/C for this to be of use to you. The good thing is the C is the linga-franca for computer operating systems - once you can get to C you can get to.

Lua has many strengths. Among them are its small size and portability. Unzipped, Lua’s source files weigh in at a meager 800K. The stand-alone Lua interpreter binary is not quite 250K, and its compiled, static library measures less than 500K. Lua’s tiny footprint is particularly ideal for embedded devices, where resources are limited. Also, since the language is written in portable, ANSI C, Lua can run on practically any device that has a C compiler written for it. This means that Lua has a unique place in the up-and-coming Internet of Things (IoT) device industry.

In addition to small size and portability, Lua’s embeddability should not be overlooked. By using Lua’s C API (Application Programming Interface), developers can extend their static programs with dynamic Lua code. For example, many video games rely on C for its raw speed when it comes to graphics computations, but game logic is easily prototyped, written, and tested with Lua, which requires no recompilation.

Despite its longevity, Lua has a unique place in the modern web development world inside NGINX, one of the world’s most popular web servers. OpenResty is a dynamic web platform that “embeds the power of Lua into Nginx HTTP Servers”, and one of its biggest users is Cloudflare which depends on Lua’s incredible speed as a scripting language.

While Lua is an easy language to learn (its entire reference manual is just 100 printed pages in length), developers might scoff at its small, seemingly primitive standard library, which is a side-effect of Lua’s commitment to platform portability. However, this is where the LuaRocks project comes into play. LuaRocks is the de facto package manager for community-contributed Lua modules (a.k.a. libraries) — over 1200 of them to be precise. Modules for everything from working with sockets to filesystem manipulation to web frameworks are available. It’s also extremely easy to contribute your own “rocks”.

It’s easy to see why Lua is growing in both interest and use in the software industry. The language’s unique combination of small size, speed, portability, and embeddability make it an ideal candidate for a wide array of applications in embedded devices, the gaming industry, web applications, and beyond.

– – –

If you haven’t already, sign up to be the first to know when our ActiveLua distribution has been released.
– – –

Lua is an extremely powerful interpreted language. It is most well known for its use in API’s (Application Programming Interface). From World of Warcraft to Kaseya’s VSA, all sorts of applications in different industries rely on Lua to make things work. Lua is almost everywhere, but is still relatively unknown.

Lua is more than just a language for API’s, it excels as a programming language in its own right. It’s fast and efficient, especially considered to other interpreted languages. Lua also has a JIT (Just In Time) compiler which makes it even faster for certain applications.

You can use it for making games, it has many modern frameworks which keep it competitive, and it’s great for general purpose system scripting. Lua is a powerhouse when used correctly. I’ve used it to replace Perl for most tasks and for Windows automation.

Lua For Games

Frameworks like Love2D (or LÖVE) and Corona make Lua practical for game programming. These two frameworks allow the creation of professional games which are cross-platform. Both are extremely mature and feature-rich.

LÖVE allows you to implement 2D games easily and efficiently from the ground up with worrying about the low-level graphics. The engine is extremely powerful and intuitive. It also has many extra libraries to add things like collision detection and similar. LÖVE’s only fallback is a lot of the library names can sound a bit immature.

Corona is a library for building games for the likes of iOS and Android as well as more traditional environments like Windows and MacOS. It’s free and open-source. Corona also has a massive community backing it and making it easy to learn and work with. It also works with Steam’s platform with a plugin.

Corona is the more commercially viable of the two for sure, but LÖVE is a great framework to learn on and to work with. There are still games on which are made with LÖVE, but they require extra work to get there. Both of these frameworks are extremely powerful and feature rich and can be used to make high quality games relatively easily.

Modern App Frameworks

No Matter If I Use Lua Stand-alone Or Embedded In A C-Programming Environment, Underlying It Will Always Use C-Code? C Is Ordinarily A Compiled La...

If you don’t care about making games, Lua still has you covered. Lua has modern web frameworks via Lapis and Luvit (among many). It also has a deep machine learning framework via Torch. All of these are open source and easy to use (all things considered).

Lapis allows the creation of flexible, self-contained REST API based applications (brush up on your JSON). With a little extra work, you can use it for quick, self-contained microservices. It can easily be extended to resemble Perl’s Dancer and many other equivalent frameworks.

If Node.JS is more your thing, give Luvit a chance. Luvit implements the same API as Node.JS in Lua so it’s easy to migrate to or use if you’re already used to Node. It’s mature, extensible, and uses a similar backing as one of the most popular asynchronous frameworks in the world.

Aside from Lapis and Luvit, there are dozens of other frameworks of varying levels of maturity with different philosophies. I never really felt the need to move from Lapis for anything I do with web programming in Lua so I haven’t played with all that many. That being said, there are a lot.

Lua Is An Interpreted Language Or As The Wiki Informally Puts It A 'software Processed' Language. Lua Is Compiled Into Byte Code (not To Be Confuse...

See Full List On Codeproject.com

Torch is an extremely powerful scientific framework for LuaJIT which is often used for machine learning. Torch works well with C, leverages GPU’s, and is extremely flexible. For a machine learning framework, it is extremely simple but powerfu

Extend C With Lua