Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
Why choose Lua?
Lua is a proven, robust language. Lua is commonly described as a “multi-paradigm” language, providing a small set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types, rather than providing a more complex and rigid specification to match a single paradigm. Lua has been used in many industrial applications e.g., Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom, digital TV in Brazil and games. Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games. Lua has a solid reference manual and several versions of Lua have been released and used in real applications since its creation in 1993.
Features of Lua:
Lua is fast: Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. A substantial fraction of large applications have been written in Lua.
Lua is portable: Lua is distributed in a small package and builds out-of-the-box in all platforms that have an ANSI/ISO C compiler. Lua runs on all flavors of Unix and Windows, and also on mobile devices and embedded microprocessors for applications like Lego MindStorms. For specific reasons why Lua is a good choice also for constrained devices, read this summary by Mike Pall. See also a poster created by Timm Müller.
Lua is Embeddable: Lua is a fast language engine with small footprint that you can embed easily into your application. Lua has a simple and well documented API that allows strong integration with code written in other languages. Lua has been used to extend programs written not only in C and C++, but also in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, Erlang, and even in other scripting languages. It is easy to extend Lua with libraries written in other languages. It is also easy to extend programs written in other languages with Lua.
Lua is Powerful and Simple: A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways.
Lua is Free: Lua is free software, distributed under very well-known MIT license. Lua is not an open-source project, with code contributed by several people: all code is written by us. It can be used for any purpose, including commercial purposes, at absolutely no cost. Just download it and use it.
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