Lua

Lua is a programming language created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy.

#34on PLDB	30Years Old	58.9kUsers
35Books	13Papers	244kRepos

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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...

Lua website
Lua downloads page
Lua Wikipedia page
PLDB has 2 documentation sites for Lua: www.lua.org, devdocs.io
Lua mailing list
There are at least 243,541 Lua repos on GitHub
Lua first developed in Tecgraf
PLDB estimates there are currently 1k job openings for Lua programmers.
file extensions for Lua include lua, fcgi, nse, p8, pd_lua, rbxs, rockspec and wlua
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 15,290 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
PLDB has 3 Jupyter Kernels for Lua: github.com, github.com, github.com
There is a central package repository for Lua
Release Notes for Lua
Official Blog page for Lua
Frequently Asked Questions 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, Perl 6, Parrot, Android, C
Read more about Lua on the web: 1.
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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

Keywords in Lua

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

Feature	Supported	Token	Example
Scientific Notation	✓
Conditionals	✓
Functions	✓
While Loops	✓
Booleans	✓	true false
Strings	✓	"
Print() Debugging	✓	print
Maps	✓		https://www.lua.org/pil/2.5.html
Line Comments	✓	--	-- A comment
Operator Overloading	✓
Assignment	✓
MultiLine Comments	✓	--[[ --]]	--[[ A comment. --]]
Comments	✓
Case Insensitive Identifiers	X
Semantic Indentation	X

title	author	year	reviews	ratings	rating
Programming in Lua	Roberto Ierusalimschy	2001	21	323	3.97

Books about Lua from ISBNdb

title	authors	year	publisher
LÖVE for Lua Game Programming	Akinlaja, Darmie	2013	Packt Publishing
Programming In Lua	Ierusalimschy, Roberto	2003	Roberto Ierusalimschy
Lua 5.1 Reference Manual	Ierusalimschy, Roberto and de Figueiredo, Luiz Henrique and Celes, Waldemar	2006	Lua.org
Learn Lua for iOS Game Development	Varma, Jayant	2012	Apress
Beginning Lua Programming	Kurt Jung and Aaron Brown	2011	John Wiley & Sons
CryENGINE Game Programming with C++, C#, and Lua	Lundgren, Filip and Pearce-Authers, Ruan	2013	Packt Publishing
Learn Lua for iOS Game Development	Varma, Jayant	2013	Apress
Lua Quick Start Guide: The easiest way to learn Lua programming	Szauer, Gabor	2018-07-27T00:00:01Z	Packt Publishing
Lua Quick Start Guide: The easiest way to learn Lua programming	Szauer, Gabor	2018	Packt Publishing
Coding Roblox Games Made Easy: The ultimate guide to creating games with Roblox Studio and Lua programming	Brumbaugh, Zander	2021	Packt Publishing
Beginning Lua with World of Warcraft Add-ons	Emmerich, Paul	2009	Apress
Beginning Lua Programming	Jung, Kurt	2007	Wrox
Programming in Lua	Ierusalimschy, Roberto	2013-01-03T00:00:01Z	Lua.org
Coding with Roblox Lua in 24 Hours: The Official Roblox Guide	Official Roblox Books (HarperCollins)	2021	Sams Publishing
Basic ROBLOX Lua Programming: (Black and White Edition)	LaRouche, Brandon John	2012	CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Coding Roblox Games Made Easy: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Games with Roblox Studio and Lua programming	Zander Brumbaugh	2021	Packt Publishing - ebooks Account
Lua Programming Gems		2008	Lua.org
Beginning Lua with World of Warcraft Add-ons	Emmerich, Paul	2009	Apress
Learning Game AI Programming with Lua	Young, David	2014	Packt Publishing
CryENGINE Game Programming with C++, C#, and Lua	Lundgren, Filip and Pearce-Authers, Ruan	2013	Packt Publishing
Lua Game Development Cookbook: Over 70 recipes that will help you master the elements and best practices required to build a modern game engine using Lua	Kasuba, Mario	2015	Packt Publishing
Developing Games on the Raspberry Pi: App Programming with Lua and LÖVE	Kenlon, Seth	2018-12-20T00:00:01Z	Apress
ComputerCraft: Lua Programming in Minecraft	Monk, Matthew and Monk, Simon	2013	CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Programming Lua	Roberto Ierusalimschy	2001	O'Reilly Media
Lua Programming Language, First Edition	Lua Publishing	2019
Lua Programming Language: Lua, Luatex, Luaforge	Books and LLC	2010
Beginning Lua Programming	Kurt Jung	2007	John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Lua (programming Language)	Frederic P. Miller and Agnes F. Vandome and John McBrewster and Miller and Frederic P. and Vandome and Agnes F. and McBrewster and John	2009
Basic Roblox Lua Programming			Brandon Larouche
Lua Game Development Cookbook	Mario Kasuba	20150728	Packt Publishing
Programming In Lua Lua Programming Language Official Reference (2009) Isbn: 4048677977 [japanese Import]	Roberto Ierusalimschy; Kei ShinjoÌ	2009	ToÌkyoÌ : AsukiÌmediawaÌkusu, ToÌkyoÌ : KadokawaguruÌpupaburisshingu. 2009 ;
LOVE for Lua Game Programming	Darmie Akinlaja	20131003	Packt Publishing
Learning Game AI Programming with Lua	David Young	20141128	Packt Publishing
LÖve For Lua Game Programming: Master The Lua Programming Language And Build Exciting Strategy-based Games In 2d Using The LÖve Framework	Akinlaja, Darmie.		Packt Pub.

Publications about Lua from Semantic Scholar

title	authors	year	citations	influentialCitations
Typed Lua: An Optional Type System for Lua	André Murbach Maidl and Fabio Mascarenhas and R. Ierusalimschy	2014	20	1
Programming with Multiple Paradigms in Lua	R. Ierusalimschy	2009	14	0
Processing sequence annotation data using the Lua programming language.	Y. Ueno and Masanori Arita and Toshitaka Kumagai and K. Asai	2003	11	0
Lua Code: Security Overview and Practical Approaches to Static Analysis	Andrei Costin	2017	9	0
Luandri: A Clean Lua Interface to the Indri Search Engine	Bhaskar Mitra and Fernando Diaz and Nick Craswell	2017	5	0
Unit test code generator for lua programming language	Junno Tantra Pratama Wibowo and B. Hendradjaya and Yani Widyani	2015	5	0
LuaRocks - A Declarative and Extensible Package Management System for Lua	Hisham H. Muhammad and Fabio Mascarenhas and R. Ierusalimschy	2013	4	0
GUI rendering engine utilizing Lua as script	Dusan Zivkov and Daniel Kurtjak and Mladen Grumic	2015	3	0
Operational Semantics for Featherweight Lua	Hao Lin	2015	3	1
From visual scripting to Lua	Mwawi F. Msiska and L. V. Zijl	2012	1	0
Towards a GPU Abstraction for Lua	Raphael Ribeiro and Paulo Motta	2016	1	0
Beginning Lua Scripting	Jaken Chandler Herman	2019	1	0
Remote Sensing Image Processing Functions in Lua Language	R. F. B. Marujo and Leila Maria Garcia Fonseca and T. Körting and H. N. Bendini and G. R. Queiroz and L. Vinhas and K. Ferreira	2017	1	0

Lua - Programming language

Keywords in Lua

Language features

Books about Lua on goodreads

Books about Lua from ISBNdb

Publications about Lua from Semantic Scholar