[HN Gopher] What's New in Lua 5.4
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What's New in Lua 5.4
Author : benhoyt
Score : 29 points
Date : 2020-07-15 20:39 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I've heard that a major use case for Lua is to enable scripting
| in game engines - for something like that, it sounds perfect,
| because the entire runtime is just a couple thousand lines of C
| with few dependencies, that can be literally copy-pasted into
| your codebase if need be.
|
| But honestly, I can't recommend Lua for any other use case.
| You'll be chugging along and then run into a brick wall when you
| need e.g. real regexes instead of Lua's comparatively crippled
| pattern matching, or a networking library that isn't hosted on
| one professor's personal web page that hasn't been updated in
| years. Take it from someone who had to throw out and port a bunch
| of Lua scripts when they just couldn't keep up with new business
| requirements: Python or Perl or Ruby is almost always a better
| choice.
| blibble wrote:
| I used to quite like Lua, but got quite consistently wound by up
| several things - global variables by defauilt
| - weird choice of certain operators (~= for not equal) -
| arrays start at 1
|
| (fixed yet?)
| ebg13 wrote:
| ~= and 1-indexing are only weird if you haven't seen them
| before. MATLAB uses them as well.
| jontro wrote:
| The tilde ~ char is pretty annoying to type on swedish
| keyboards at least. Alt + " and a space on my mac. Having to
| type this regularly on my main languages would be off putting
| deathanatos wrote:
| It's not just weird, or different, though; there are reasons
| to prefer 0-based indexing: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/E
| WD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
| sk0g wrote:
| Isn't "weird == not seen it before" anyway? I get what you're
| trying to say, but MATLAB is not really a programming
| language SWEs would use, so if that's the best example you
| can think of, Lua's bound to confuse most people in the
| industry.
|
| May work better for mathematicians, non-SW engineers etc, but
| I wouldn't know.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Julia is 1-indexed as well.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _I get what you 're trying to say, but MATLAB is not
| really a programming language SWEs would use_
|
| It may not be a language that website jockeys use, but "I
| don't use it therefore probably no one does" is almost
| never correct. MATLAB is huge in state machine and dynamic
| systems programming as well as being the original
| commercial powerhouse for linear algebra algorithms.
| rjeli wrote:
| Very nice, congrats to the Liz team :)
|
| The new `const` and RAII/resource scope language features remind
| me of the golang discussion yesterday, someone linked Pike saying
| JS/TS, C++, Hack, etc keep borrowing features from each other. Of
| course we won't fully converge on some perfect syntax any time
| soon, or ever, but we seem to be settling into a general
| consensus on syntax in general, and semantics of dynamic
| languages.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Lua is a language I really want to love. I like the emphasis on
| simplicity and minimalism, and the Scheme-like semantics, which
| mix imperative and functional styles, really hits a sweet spot
| IMO. LuaJIT is a crazy impressive feat of software engineering.
| However, there are some specific issues which hold Lua back IMO.
| First, as LuaJIT author Mike Pall famously noted, the Lua authors
| constantly break compatibility between releases. Lua is really
| several different, incompatible languages (Lua 5.1, 5.2, etc).
| LuaJIT is still at Lua 5.1, IIRC. Second, there are a bunch of
| minor nitpicks (1-based-indexing, anyone?) which turn off a bunch
| of people. Lastly, because Lua is so minimal and focused on
| portability, people end up reimplementing their own abstractions
| (such as object systems) from scratch, further fracturing the
| ecosystem. I think there's a space for a new project, which takes
| LuaJIT as a starting point and addresses some of the issues I
| described. It would also be great if this hypothetical new
| language had better support for Unicode and concurrency.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _LuaJIT is still at Lua 5.1, IIRC_
|
| It's 5.1 plus some of 5.2.
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