Lua - Programming language

Lua is an open source programming language created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy.

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Lua ( LOO-ə, from Portuguese: lua [ˈlu.(w)ɐ] meaning moon) is a lightweight, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded systems and clients. Lua is cross-platform, since the interpreter is written in ANSI C, and has a relatively simple C API. Lua was originally designed in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: programming language
There are at least 243,541 Lua repos on GitHub
Early development of Lua happened in Tecgraf
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 23k users using Lua in 34k repos on GitHub
Check out the 24 Lua meetup groups on Meetup.com.
There are 20,927 members in the Lua subreddit
There are 477 Project Euler users using Lua
Explore Lua snippets on Rosetta Code
Lua on HOPL
Lua ranks #30 in the TIOBE Index
Lua Ubuntu package
ANTLR grammar for Lua
Lua LSP implementation
CodeMirror package for syntax highlighting Lua
Monaco package for syntax highlighting Lua
Pygments supports syntax highlighting for Lua
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for Lua
Lua appears in the Quine Relay project
Learn Lua on exercism.
PLDB has 3 Jupyter Kernels for Lua: github.com, github.com, github.com
There is a central package repository for Lua
Indeed.com has 736 matches for "lua developer".
lua.org was registered in 2000
See also: (28 related languages) CLU, Modula-2, Scheme, SNOBOL, Falcon, GameMonkey Script, Io, JavaScript, Julia, MiniD, Red, Ruby, Squirrel, Tcl, Lisp, Python, Modula, awk, Ada, Eiffel, Haskell, SQL, VHDL, Self, Raku, Parrot, Android, C
Read more about Lua on the web: 1.
68 PLDB concepts link to Lua: Ace Editor, Apache Arrow, BlitzMax, Bounce, buzz, Carbon, CIR, circle-lang, cloc, commonmark, ConCurr, CSpydr, Cyber, Deno, Djot, DRAKON, Emscripten, Encore, Factor, Fennel, FlatBuffers, Haxe, Hina, Hook, Hush, Ibis, Jakt, Jammy, Lean, Lil, Lily, LuaJIT, mal, Matplotlib, micro-editor, Minilang, MongoDB, MoonScript, mun-lang, mycroft, Nelua, oopsilon, PHP, Pragtical, Prism, Pygments, raptorjit, Redis, RMarkdown, rosie, Savi, sile, Speedie, sporth, tbox-lib, Terra, Textadept, titan, Typed Lua, UCL, Umka, UrWeb, VLC, WebAssembly, Wax, Wonkey, Wren, Wu

Example from Riju:

print("Hello, world!")

Example from hello-world:

print("Hello World")

Example from the Hello World Collection:

# Hello World in Lua

print "Hello world"

Example from Linguist:


-- A simple counting object that increments an internal counter whenever it receives a bang at its first inlet, or changes to whatever number it receives at its second inlet.

local HelloCounter = pd.Class:new():register("h-counter")

function HelloCounter:initialize(sel, atoms)
	self.inlets = 2
	self.outlets = 1
	self.num = 0
	return true
end

function HelloCounter:in_1_bang()
	self:outlet(1, "float", {self.num})
	self.num = self.num + 1
end

function HelloCounter:in_2_float(f)
	self.num = f
end

Example from Wikipedia:

$ cc -o example example.c -llua
$ ./example
Result: 8

Lua Keywords

and break do else elseif end false for function goto if in local nil not or repeat return then true until while

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
Standard Library	✓	print("Hello, World!")
Constants	✓	pi = 3.14159
Lists	✓	myList = {1, 2, 3}
Bitwise Operators	✓	& \| ~ << >> ~
Hexadecimals	✓	-- 0[xX][0-9a-fA-F]+ (integer) -- 0[xX][0-9a-fA-F]*\.[0-9a-fA-F]+([pP][+-]?[0-9]+)? (float) 0x5F3759DF 0x0.1D 0xA23p-4 0X1.921FB54442D18P+1
Integers	✓	80766866
Floats	✓	-- [0-9]\.[0-9]+([eE][+-]?[0-9]+)? -- (decimal float) -- 0[xX][0-9a-fA-F]\.[0-9a-fA-F]+([pP][+-]?[0-9]+)? -- (hex float)
Scientific Notation	✓	1E2 .12345E+6 1.e+0 0x15e-2 0x2.p10 0X.8p-0 0x1.Fp+0 0x1fffp-16 0x1p-2
Conditionals	✓	if true then print("true") end
Functions	✓	function myFunction() print("hello") end
While Loops	✓	while true do print("hello") end
Booleans	✓	true false	true false
Strings	✓	"Hello world"	"
Print() Debugging	✓	print("hello world")	print
Maps	✓	myMap = { key = "value", [35] = 35, }
Line Comments	✓	-- A comment	--
Operator Overloading	✓
Assignment	✓
MultiLine Comments	✓	--[[ A comment. --]]	--[[ --]]
Comments	✓
Case Insensitive Identifiers	X
Semantic Indentation	X
Octals	X