Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts (2012)

Lua is a very nice piece of technology. Its source code is pretty easy to get into, the documentation is complete. It has its quirks yes, but if I need to add scripting to a software, I'd consider Lua before considering writing a DSL, simply because you can pretty much embed Lua's source in your C/C++ software as a static library[0]. The stack-based approach makes it so easy to interact with C/C++, and I've been looking at the Rust bindings[1]…

Lua's great. I recently used it to rewrite a small audio effect framework[1] based on an older project of mine in C[2]. To my astonishment, without any optimization efforts on my part, the LuaJIT version of one effect ran faster than the C version, while another more complicated effect (a filter) only took 2.01x as much time as C. And this was with simple, clean, mostly declarative code (read it on GitHub and see what you think). One of the…

I have a new meta-pet-peeve: people who are peeved by one-indexing. EDIT: I guess it went into his "differetn" category. Never mind.... Why is one-indexing at the top of his list of bad things, or even on a list of things that matter? It is like getting stuck on adjectives after the noun... My opinion, not widely shared here, is that 1-indexing is best for scripting and math languages where 1-indexing corresponds directly to the subscripts in the formulas. In…