Lua is a scripting language developed at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) that has come to be the leading scripting language for video games worldwide. It is also used extensively in embedded devices like set-top boxes and TVs and in other applications like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Wikipedia. Its first version was released in 1993. The current version, Lua 5.3, was released in 2015.
Though mainly a procedural language, Lua lends itself to several other paradigms, including object-oriented programming, functional programming, and data-driven programming.5 It also offers good support for data description, in the style of JavaScript and JSON. Data description was indeed one of our main motivations for creating Lua, some years before the appearance of XML and JavaScript.
The really neat part about Lua though is how insanely widespread it’s usage is without people realizing it. The L4 micro-kernel uses Lua for it’s startup scripting. NetBSD has a component that lets you write kernel drivers and packet filters in Lua. There’s a Lua module for NGnix that lets you generate content and apply arbitrarily complex rewrite and access rules. TI-Nspire calculators support being programmed in Lua. A lot of end-user applications that aren’t video games support Lua scripting too.
The even neater thing is that it’s actually possible to get Lua code running just as fast as natively compiled C code.
Always far better than Perl…
Everything except PHP is better than Perl.
And Tcl
There’s an app called Unified Remote that lets you control your PC from mobile devices, and uses Lua for scripting on the back end. Quite useful, if you’re into that kind of thing
Also Rockbox free replacement firmware/OS for digital music players ( https://www.rockbox.org/ ) supports plugins in Lua.
There’s actually a rather surprisingly large number of devices with a third-party firmware option that supports Lua. LEGO’s MINDSTORMS NXT and NXT2 platforms are probably my favorite example of this personally.
But reading like scripting sligthly above C.
And hooked on The Games.
Ahferroin7 says it’s onto L4.
First guess it’s only on Ring0 mode.
Any other scenario, huge liability.
(Feels of clean, well made arch).
Edited 2018-10-30 21:54 UTC