Last year I discovered Lua and LuaJIT.
These are both amazing implementations of the programming language Lua.
Ok now I need to explain why I think Lua is fabulous and these implementations are amazing.
Lua is a very small, dynamic, scripting language that is extremely easy to learn, and that can be used standalone as well as an embedded scripting language. The well documented and well crafted C API for extending the language is probably one of the best features of the Lua system.
It takes less that a minute to compile and build the Lua language and its basic libraries. Since the language is written in ANSI C, you can virtually build it on any platform.
LuaJIT is a JIT implementation of Lua created by a guy called Mike Pall who is without a doubt a programming wizard. LuaJIT features an interpreter that is hand-crafted in assembler, and has an amazing FFI library that allows easy extensions in C, including creating new data types. LuaJIT comes with an assembler called DynASM that is itself written in Lua.
Neither of these implementations depend on third-party libraries or tools ... which is an amazing thing in today's world (just look at the dependency list of Julia for comparison).
I hope to use Lua extensively in the future, so much so that I decided to learn assembler in order to be able to understand LuaJIT better.
These are both amazing implementations of the programming language Lua.
Ok now I need to explain why I think Lua is fabulous and these implementations are amazing.
Lua is a very small, dynamic, scripting language that is extremely easy to learn, and that can be used standalone as well as an embedded scripting language. The well documented and well crafted C API for extending the language is probably one of the best features of the Lua system.
It takes less that a minute to compile and build the Lua language and its basic libraries. Since the language is written in ANSI C, you can virtually build it on any platform.
LuaJIT is a JIT implementation of Lua created by a guy called Mike Pall who is without a doubt a programming wizard. LuaJIT features an interpreter that is hand-crafted in assembler, and has an amazing FFI library that allows easy extensions in C, including creating new data types. LuaJIT comes with an assembler called DynASM that is itself written in Lua.
Neither of these implementations depend on third-party libraries or tools ... which is an amazing thing in today's world (just look at the dependency list of Julia for comparison).
I hope to use Lua extensively in the future, so much so that I decided to learn assembler in order to be able to understand LuaJIT better.
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