Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by timcameronryan 5347 days ago
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.

3 comments

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?

Hmm, you could target iphone wax https://github.com/probablycorey/wax to make a coffescript dev environment for iOS. Wax is a really nice environment.

Using javascript as a language instead of Lua for scripting though seems odd, as Lua is pretty easy to use instead.

If you like CoffeeScript you should try out http://moonscript.org

CoffeeScript inspired syntax that compiles right to Lua.