Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yanex 2444 days ago
It seems that quite a lot of people use Lua. I liked the language, it's tiny and well-made. However, I wasn't happy about the tooling support. IDE plugins, documentation generators, lint checkers – all of this seem abandoned. Is there any similar language (embeddable, good C interoperability) with better tooling besides JavaScript?
3 comments
uvtc 2443 days ago
If you want Lua under the hood, but a more industrial-strength language on top, you might have a look at Haxe. It can compile to Lua (among other languages/platforms).

https://haxe.org/manual/target-lua-getting-started.html

link
legends2k 2444 days ago
[Nim][1] seems to be a potential option.

[1]: https://nim-lang.org/

link
yanex 2444 days ago
The language looks really nice. I especially like its strong-typing nature. It seems, though, that it won't be easy to embed – Nim compiler requires either gcc or clang.
link
sdegutis 2444 days ago
QuickJS is a Lua-like JS interpreter if you’re ok with JS.
link
yanex 2444 days ago
Well, I'm not a big fan of JavaScript :) I like the direction ECMAScript is going. However, the clumsy things are going to stay because of backward compatibility.

Also, QuickJS is a good initiative, but I afraid it's not production-ready yet. It doesn't even have versioning and/or changelog.

link
sdegutis 2444 days ago
The top of https://bellard.org/quickjs/ is the changelog and each release is versioned by date.

Nobody's a fan of the quirks of JS, but you can almost entirely ignore them and only use the good parts.

link
yanex 2444 days ago
Well, I won't call "New release" / "New release" a changelog. It's simply not a log of changes.
link