Roblox Creates React In Lua

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[mxruben]

Roblox actually did this a long time ago. It's mainly used to write ui code in their engine. Afaik they aren't actually using lua for their website? Also, fun fact, their fork of lua (called luau) has a type system and some other goodies such as compound assignment and continue statements in loops. It does this while still staying simple. Best part is that it's open source and you can use it freely (although their c API documentation is lacking). I haven't wanted to go back to vanilla lua since.

[aarond]

Lua’s length operator is actually even *more special* than you think.
#tbl returns the length of the table *only* when the table is a “sequence” (ie contains sequential keys only).
If any keys are non-sequential (think nils or strings), the result of #tbl is undefined and up to implementations.

[berkormanli]

As a part-time fun based Lua developer, there is a beautiful thing in Lua called Metatable and Metamethods. Since Lua lacks classes, these two can mimic some of object oriented behavior. You can easily change a table's behavior by using those metamethods. If you want to create an Array class, you would change the _newindex metamethod (this will be called when there is an assignment, _index will be called when there is an access.) to count its length and also set it with rawset() method. You can also change the behavior of the length operator (#). Using Lua made me furious because it lacks so many things like data structures and some algorithms/functionality you would consider a standard but later on after spending some time trying to implement things, this made me actually realize how much someone can forget the basics because using a library is a lot easier. It is a crazy small and core language that can be a lot more by using what it provides.

[fcktyshawn]

i recommend everyone learn roblox lua. the best introduction to programming for kids. i started with roblox lua in 6th grade and now i'm a 22 computer technician and hobbyist programmer.

[RenderingUser]

man, if only roblox didnt permaban linux as a platform

[griffitaj]

You can learn Lua in less than a day. It has the bare minimal set of semantics needed for a language. One collection type, tables. Strings as atoms (think Erlang), so they are blazingly fast to compare.

[omri]

You better hope the cricket won't DMCA this video, he seems determined.

[bharatsnair]

Redis has embedded Lua, which lets you write Lua scripts that are atomic. Fun language to work with.

[triducal]

as a roblox dev react-lua is extremely useful for creating declaritive ui functionality and makes it alot easier to put together large projects.

[MatiasKiviniemi]

Great thing about Lua is that there's zero time wasted on architectual formalities, you just start coding. And since there's really no bad ways of solving something, results are never too horrible. Good developers make great code (as always), average coders make ok code and even bad ones make better code than in more complex environments with more options to screw yourself. I've done multiple-inheritance OO in lua, had every game object contained a Components-table where you could inject any game feature. Game loop iterated through those and class methods just had object as first param.

[lolgreek]

It is used to make GUI for Roblox games

[devcomptrickshots]

This is a bit misinformed. First off, Roblox uses luau (not lua), luau is a typed and much more performant lua alternative. The codebases were old, and before GitHub support luau syntax highlighting, and hence they're marked as lua. Secondly, Roblox's frontend is *not* written in luau, these libraries are equivalents to JS libraries for writing games on their platform. The only bit of frontend which uses this is their desktop app (LuaApp).


EDIT: I noticed some people ask about typed arrays, and doc comments and a standard library; the luau community has made things for this. Typed arrays are built into luau types, doc comments are powered by moonwave (it's similar to rustdoc, it generates a doc site from comments for you) and lune is a runtime which implements a complete, lightweight, and fast standard library for it.

[StamPunk]

Yo dog, i heard you like Integrated development environments, so we downloaded an integrated development environment to program an integrated development environment so you can program an integrated development environment with my integrated development environment.

[johnathanrhoades]

I’m currently reading the “Programming in Lua” book. It’s interesting for sure. Looking at it for writing a neovim plugin.

[inconnn]

lua on roblox is how i got into programming in the first place, so i have a soft-spot in my heart for lua

[dareisaysneed]

you should implement preemptive coroutines/goroutines in vanilla lua with the debug library

[Nadi_Games]

I've been using lua for almost 20 years: World of Warcraft addons, it's lua 😉 Iirc, it was the 1st time I used it.
And Prime is right, lua is a fantastic language. Even the name is cool, and poetic. Lua is not an acronym, it just means moon in portuguese. 🌔

[iddiiddrisu]

OMG!!! My embedded systems just got a new frontend. React-lua!!! Let's go!!!

[justin]

The funny part about Prime's "don't use a DSL, use Lua" is that Roberto Ierusalimschy, the BDFL of Lua, teaches a MOOC focused on creating small languages using Lua.

[jonatasbaldan]

Is Lua itself getting updates? The interpreter shows "1994~2012".