Hey all, I'm posting this to HN to see if there's any interest in a full-fledged JavaScript port to Lua. Colony right now is a proof-of-concept, but there might be a real use case out there for embeddable JavaScript where solutions like V8 would simply be too large.
Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tutorials of the Corona SDK (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/, a cross-platform mobile SDK that uses Lua) by programming CoffeeScript instead, which was surprisingly fun.
Interesting idea and possibly worth tossing out to the World of Warcraft addons/scripting community (single largest Lua end-user install base in the world, I believe) as well?
BTW, the name seems a bit tacky for a language developed in Brazil given the colonial history. Was there another reason for naming it that I've missed?
- and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS?
Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.
Many C applications use Lua as an embedded scripting language. This program would be very useful if the developers of the application wanted to extend scripting support to Javascript (and compile-to-JS languages) without having to modify their C code.
Exactly, I've worked with the Lua C API before, it was fairly easy to use. I've looked at the V8 API before. Compared to Lua, it is far more complicated.
Perhaps the best way to write a transpiler so there's no bugs is to write two of them at the same time, i.e. in this case Lua-to-JS and JS-to-Lua. Maybe it's easier to catch bugs.
This mirrors the idea of writing a compiler for a new language in itself as soon as possible.
I remember google's dart that compiled to javascript which ran 7% as fast as hand-written javascript. I wonder what the performance for this will be compared to handwritten lua? I've tried wrapping everything into tables like this in lua, and there definitely is a performance penalty.
I guess programmers will always be programmers. "Ooo look, this year CPU speed has quadtripled! Let's make a compiler for X to Y which will reduce performance by only 75%; It means you can run it at the same speed as running hand-written Y last year!"
I'll cringe when I see someone creating a WoW addon using this.
Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tutorials of the Corona SDK (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/, a cross-platform mobile SDK that uses Lua) by programming CoffeeScript instead, which was surprisingly fun.