Lua: liking it.
I started investigating Lua recently and I must say there’s a lot to like. Lua has a very minimalistic syntax and an equally minimalistic standard library. This minimalism leads to two major advantages:
- It’s very easy to integrate Lua into any environment because Lua’s minimalism demands very little support.
- It’s very easy to extend Lua because it’s implemented in pure C, including the entire standard library – there are no support files to drag around.
Don’t be fooled by Lua’s apparently bare-bones syntax and standard library, Lua is a highly capable language, with all of the power of larger, more widespread languages. Lua reminds me a lot of JavaScript in that one can implement a lot of interesting and useful constructs that are not native to the language using a simple set of powerful primitives.
I could go into some examples here, but I’ll leave that for another post. Instead, go check Lua out for yourself!