> Higher order functions, coroutines, the ability to return multiple values from a function
These features are in almost any language nowadays, including most of languages that AOT-compile to native code. Well, maybe without multiple returned values, with tuples instead, but this is the same thing, especially if there's some primitive destructuring support.
Type coercion for comparison is quite rare too, even js has `===`.
But no standard library at all, so everyone brings his own incompatible hacks (by copy-pasting snippets) and processes lists (hashes emulating lists because there are no real lists) with `for` loop. Even with `for` loop it's not that obvious how to loop over list.
I tried writing in Lua and can't stand it at all, even JS feels much nicer. Lua is minimalism for sake of minimalism, and it heavily hampers practicality. Easily embeddable? Who cares if embedded runtime is 100 Kb or 2000 Kb?
Well, it might be a good language if comparing it to Basic from 80s home computers, so it's used in PICO-8.
> Who cares if embedded runtime is 100 Kb or 2000 Kb?
We ran Lua on the PSP with 8MB of system memory inside a pre-allocated block of 400kb. Did the whole game logic and state management with no hiccups(and this was before LuaJIT).
Not everything is desktop scale, lots of applications in spaces like routers, wearables and other constrained devices.
I've also seen few langauges handle coroutines and clean and simple as Lua does them.
These features are in almost any language nowadays, including most of languages that AOT-compile to native code. Well, maybe without multiple returned values, with tuples instead, but this is the same thing, especially if there's some primitive destructuring support.
Type coercion for comparison is quite rare too, even js has `===`.
But no standard library at all, so everyone brings his own incompatible hacks (by copy-pasting snippets) and processes lists (hashes emulating lists because there are no real lists) with `for` loop. Even with `for` loop it's not that obvious how to loop over list.
I tried writing in Lua and can't stand it at all, even JS feels much nicer. Lua is minimalism for sake of minimalism, and it heavily hampers practicality. Easily embeddable? Who cares if embedded runtime is 100 Kb or 2000 Kb?
Well, it might be a good language if comparing it to Basic from 80s home computers, so it's used in PICO-8.