
Lua use with HN users? - throwaway7645
I noticed that Lua isn&#x27;t mentioned on here very often. I was curious if there were many users on here and if they enjoyed the project, what they used it for...etc. I know it is popular for game scripting, indie games, and maybe ML with Torch7, but that&#x27;s about it. Do you see the language ever picking up speed? It seems a little niche to me and I was more than a little turned off to find that I&#x27;d have to add a regex to my stdlib to handle the fact that there is no built-in string split function.
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etiene
Lua is my favorite interpreted programming language and I've actively joined
the community since 2014. I studied in the university where it was created and
I decided to learn it just for the moral support because why not and felt in
love with it. I observed MANY things that happened in its environment since
then and I also happen to know a lot of things about its trajectory because of
close friendships of older members of the community.

Lua had one golden age around 2008-2011 when it exploded in the game dev scene
because of it's performance and easiness of use. And I can see it picking up
speed and gaining popularity in two areas in the future:

\- Web development (maybe) because of its amazing nginx module. It's super
fast and it has the support of some companies like Cloudflare that depend on
it. It needs more traction & community but it's an amazing tool. But this
field is very difficult to break into considering that it's a saturated
environment with many tools already available. This makes Lua stuff simply get
shadowed even if they are amazing. I use it in this domain myself and I wrote
the lua space blog on Lua itself. I know of "Chinese ebay", taobao, that has
millions of products and itch.io, an indie game shop, using Lua.

\- Machine Learning (for sure) because of Torch, as you mentioned. See, the
thing is that this is a shiny new domain where Lua already has the right foot
on. Even if everybody and their dog knows python and Tensorflow is a thing,
there aren't 1543243 different tools for this to shadow Torch. If you check
this page [http://torch.ch/whoweare.html](http://torch.ch/whoweare.html) you
will also see that very important companies are using it, which means that
they are likely to encourage and widespread its use. I've recently decided to
learn ML and I have used both Torch and Tensorflow. Although I found the
initial shock of Torch bigger than Tensorflow because the amount of tutorials
& community are not as big, I found Torch easier to use.

Finally, I've seen luarocks.org evolve so much recently! I'm sure it most
definitely will have a very positive impact in the abundance of resources for
the Lua environment in the upcoming years.

I personally believe Lua will see a second golden age soon. But just to
clarify, when I see it had one golden age, in the past, it doesn't mean that
after that it lost popularity, on the contrary, the users of Lua seem to
always have grown slowly but steadily, by golden age I mean peaks.

~~~
catwell
In addition to that, I think those should be mentioned:

\- Software Defined Networking. We are starting to see LuaJIT in particular
being used to write very high performance network code in userspace (e.g.
Snabb).

\- IoT. Lua has always had a niche as an embedded language, especially on
weird small hardware platforms. It is known for being extremely easy to port
and using few resources. It is what you reach for when you want slightly more
than what a Forth gives you. See for instance the first Tessel, NodeMCU, the
Sevenhugs SDK...

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maltmurphy
Openresty (nginx bundle) is definitely getting traction and making lua more
visible in the web space. Redis using it has also introduced lua to web devs.
IoT seems like another niche it could be great for, see NodeMCU for an
example. Rackspace use it for their monitoring agents, which is based on Luvit
which is another cool project that could be used more widely.

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tjr
I know some people who use it to write scripts for avionics software
verification. I personally haven't used it.

~~~
throwaway7645
That actually sounds pretty cool. I assume the product is written in C++ or
Java and they use Lua to generate test data or run tests?

~~~
tjr
The product is more likely in Ada or C, but yes!

