<story><title>Lua: The Little Language That Could</title><url>https://matt.blwt.io/post/lua-the-little-language-that-could/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rochus</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only; Lua is also an example of excellent language design: a minimum of concepts for a maximum of expressability; it&amp;#x27;s minimal, complete and elegant.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lua is much leaner, only ~100k machine code. WAMR looks like a better candidate than Deno, but concerning performance and simplicity it has still to catch up.</text></item><item><author>rektide</author><text>Lua&amp;#x27;s presence is honestly hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs. If you needed some scripting capabilities, Lua was the way. Whether it&amp;#x27;s a webserver (nginx) or editor (vim) or a window manager (awesome), Lua was the easiest &amp;amp; best at hand option to integrate.&lt;p&gt;There is a huge opportunity, IMO, for more players here. Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this. Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brabel</author><text>I think a &amp;quot;competitor&amp;quot; to Lua would be Guile [1], but I am not sure if it gets close to Lua in terms of lightweightness... it was designed to be used in the GNU project, with similar objects as Lua: to be light, easily embeddable. It&amp;#x27;s a Scheme (Lisp) so maybe not for everyone&amp;#x27;s taste... its &amp;quot;coolest&amp;quot; use i know of is for configuring Guix [2] (the GNU version of Nix).&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;guile&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;guile&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;guix.gnu.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;guix.gnu.org&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Lua: The Little Language That Could</title><url>https://matt.blwt.io/post/lua-the-little-language-that-could/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rochus</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only; Lua is also an example of excellent language design: a minimum of concepts for a maximum of expressability; it&amp;#x27;s minimal, complete and elegant.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lua is much leaner, only ~100k machine code. WAMR looks like a better candidate than Deno, but concerning performance and simplicity it has still to catch up.</text></item><item><author>rektide</author><text>Lua&amp;#x27;s presence is honestly hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs. If you needed some scripting capabilities, Lua was the way. Whether it&amp;#x27;s a webserver (nginx) or editor (vim) or a window manager (awesome), Lua was the easiest &amp;amp; best at hand option to integrate.&lt;p&gt;There is a huge opportunity, IMO, for more players here. Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this. Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ufo</author><text>One of the reasons why Lua is minimal is that it makes it easier to embed. It&amp;#x27;s no coincidence :) &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.lua.org&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;cacm2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.lua.org&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;cacm2011.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>