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by MomsAVoxell 9 days ago
Lua has a fragmentation issue, but it is also a feature not a bug.

You can embed the Lua VM in anything. That's one thing.

You can use it as a systems tool, installed by your distro, available like any other scripting language - for this, you will find it fragment'y and weird, unless you do things 'sensibly', ignore the distro, and build your ~/.local/lua5[1,3,jit]/ directory, yourself, with luarocks - note, I have done this successfully many times, all the way to distributable .deb, so I am biased - but this is a 'hidden' way to do Lua.

And then of course there are the frameworks and engines - folks who have put the LuaVM and all its glory into their own products and opened the REPL/.lua filesystem for business.

All of this is to say there is no one 'standard' Lua approach - you will find it in various forms. A lot of times, Lua is treated as an 'also-ran'/bastard-child' in distro policies, mostly because - I assume - the reasoning is that folks who are serious about Lua will get it onboard/compile it locally/use the engine, themselves.

    $ luarocks-5.3 --local install turbolua   # the way I've stayed 'sane', personally ..