

Ask YC: Anyone using Lua for web apps? - danw

Lua looks like a nice language and I'm playing with it now. Has anyone tried building a web app in it, and if so what are your experiences?
======
LogicHoleFlaw
I have not used Lua for web apps, but I do know that the Kepler project is
quite active these days. They're developing a whole suite of tools for a Lua
web stack. www.keplerproject.org

Personally I love Lua as a language. It has just the right blend of
functional, imperative, and OO concepts to let me dabble in different styles
as I see fit. It's an elegant language which also has a great community.

Lua is what I turn to when I want to prototype an idea or just scratch out a
rough draft of some calculations. I have yet to write any in-the-large
software in it, but I suspect that it would scale nicely as well.

Anyway, have fun with Lua. I know I am!

------
hhm
Not web related but: I have used it for game development in many proyects and
it was fantastic.

~~~
pkaler
Ditto. Used it on PC, PSP, and PS3.

------
bouncingsoul
I've looked at Lua in the past. I chose not to spend time learning it because
it doesn't seem to offer anything. It's basically Python with a smaller
footprint and fewer libraries, as far I can tell.

The small footprint seems to be the most touted feature. I'm sure it's useful
if you need it, but if not, I don't see the point.

~~~
dhouston
i had the same reaction (lua resembling python but with a focus on small
footprint and a much smaller standard library.)

having "batteries included"/mature web frameworks often trumps the innate
benefits of the language, i.e. other people who have spent thousands of hours
on mostly boring glue -- ORMs, unicode support, templating engines, caching,
getting around browser quirks -- to enable you to focus on your app.

furthermore, you're generally going to be bounded by IO/the database or RAM or
some other factor in which case the speed of the language is mostly
irrelevant.

it's certainly possible to do web development in any language, but why bother
swimming upstream when python/php/ruby do a lot of the hard work for you? it's
hard enough just to write your application without having to write the
infrastructure beneath it too.

------
fab13n
This is not specifically web-app oriented, but:

<plug>Lua lovers on YNews might be interested by metalua
[<http://metalua.luaforge.net>].</plug>

------
rnc000
Take a look at

<http://google.decenturl.com/allinurl-cgilua-google-search>

I know a couple of success cases in Brazil: <http://www.vale.com> (among the 5
biggest Metal & Mining companies in the world) and <http://www.petrobras.com/>
(among the 10 biggest oil & gas companies in the world) use Lua for some parts
of their web site.

