| > What’s the dev experience actually like for serious Lua The dev experience for lua is f-ing awful. The language is small, but not “simple”; it’s stuck in 1985. The tooling is nearly non-existent and the stuff that does exist is a joke. The few libraries that exist are awful and barely maintained; the maintained libraries are maintained by neckbeards with a god-complex. The community is “reimplementing everything by hand is the right way to do it AND ALSO you’re an idiot doing it wrong” toxic. There are a million good reasons why it’s only has a foothold in nginx and Roblox territory. It’s not a joke to say that it’s f-ing terrible all the way around. |
Even "modern" languages often don't have features like first-class functions, closures, proper tail calls, etc that Lua has had for a very long time now. LuaJIT also trades blows with JS almost certainly making it the fastest or second-fastest dynamic language around.
There's a lot to like about the language (aside from array indexes starting at 1), but I think you are right about the ecosystem and probably right about most of community.