Tech Kaizen: Lua Scripting Language

Lua is a lightweight multi-paradigm programming language designed as a scripting language with "extensible semantics" as a primary goal. Lua is cross-platform since it is written in ISO C. Lua has a relatively simple C API compared to other scripting languages.

Lua is intended to be embedded into other applications, and accordingly it provides a robust, easy-to-use C API. The API is divided into two parts:

1. Lua core

2. Lua auxiliary library.

Lua Features:

1. Lua is commonly described as a “multi-paradigm” language, providing a small set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types, rather than providing a more complex and rigid specification to match a single paradigm. Lua, for instance, does not contain explicit support for inheritance, but allows it to be implemented relatively easily with metatables. Similarly, Lua allows programmers to implement namespaces, classes, and other related features using its single table implementation; first-class functions allow the employment of many powerful techniques from functional programming; and full lexical scoping allows fine-grained information hiding to enforce the principle of least privilege.

2. In general, Lua strives to provide flexible meta-features that can be extended as needed, rather than supply a feature-set specific to one programming paradigm. As a result, the base language is light – the full reference interpreter is only about 150 kB compiled - and easily adaptable to a broad range of applications.

3. Lua is a dynamically typed language intended for use as an extension or scripting language, and is compact enough to fit on a variety of host platforms. It supports only a small number of atomic data structures such as boolean values, numbers (double-precision floating point by default), and strings. Typical data structures such as arrays, sets, lists, and records can be represented using Lua’s single native data structure, the table, which is essentially a heterogeneous associative array.

4. Lua implements a small set of advanced features such as first-class functions, garbage collection, closures, proper tail calls, coercion (automatic conversion between string and number values at run time), coroutines (cooperative multitasking) and dynamic module loading. By including only a minimum set of data types, Lua attempts to strike a balance between power and size.

ref:

Lua Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

Lua for Windows Download - Binaries - http://code.google.com/p/luaforwindows/

Lua Windows Binaries and Source Code from SourceForge - http://luabinaries.sourceforge.net/

Lua Sample Code - http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode, http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/book/code.html, http://www.box.com/shared/s6hguvyuf3

Learning Lua - http://lua-users.org/wiki/LearningLua, http://phrogz.net/lua/index.html

Lua C++ bindings - http://sourceforge.net/projects/luabind/

LuaRocks(Management system for Lua modules) - http://luarocks.org/

LuaJIT - http://luajit.org/extensions.html

What makes LuaJIT faster than Lua ? - http://www.quora.com/What-makes-LuaJIT-faster-than-Lua

Programming in Lua - http://www.lua.org/pil/

Lua 5.2 Reference Manual - http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/