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by hencq
4428 days ago
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It's sort of a cross between Javascript and Java. At the moment a lot of the effort is focused on creating (client side) web apps where Javascript is used now, though the team is also working on the server side. The language feels a lot like Javascript with the warts removed and with optional typing. What's interesting is that the team consists of people with a ton of experience in writing VMs (Strongtalk, Hotspot, V8). This means many of the language decisions were chosen so they were easy to make fast. In practice this means things are sometimes less dynamic than in Javascript. |
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This is a big part of how Smalltalk was designed as well. The motivation back then was just to have a powerful OO system that would run fast enough...ish. I've seen emulations of those early Smalltalk systems. The slow reputation came from there.
I suspect the same sort of thinking went into the design of Lua.