[gadgetoid]

I’ve recently compiled a Lua-based project into WASM with Emscripten, but transpiling Lua into JS to avoid the engine overhead is compelling. I wonder how these approaches compare. For me it’s very alluring to use most of the same codebase as other deployment targets. This also has the potential to add better contextual intelligence to a web-based Lua editor- I’ll have to race it against Regex to see which is faster/better at pulling lists of locals/globals/functions out of Lua input for use in auto-complete.

[vvanders]

Honestly I'd love to go the other way, the Lua VMs are so far ahead in terms of portability, ease of integration and speed(luajit is still a marvel of engineering) but so many people are turned off by parts of the language it'd be great to present a JS interface to these runtimes.

I still remember shipping the entire game logic for a title on the PSP inside of a 400kb block and that's was before the days of luajit. It's really an incredible language and I really wish it saw more mainstream use.

[gadgetoid]

Me too! I think it’s gaining a little extra appreciation lately. For us the wow-factor was the ease of tying it together with a C host program in lieu of some conf file based alternative. For example our Keybow (Raspberry Pi-powered mechanical macro keyboard) product uses Lua to let users easily define and share macros. Not only does this trivially exceed any effort I could have made to design a domain-specific configuration file format, but it’s allowed users to try things I’d never conceived.

[orbifold]

This is what it was initially designed for.

[danbolt]

That’s super cool. Lua’s footprint has always been enticing to me because of that. Which game did you work on?