Luerl – An implementation of Lua in Erlang

github.com

39 points·johlo··10 comments

Nice to see such a resurgence of Lua.

Shame __metatable doesn't work yet as that's what really makes the language special(to me), allowing you to build any meta-language features ontop of a solid runtime. Hopefully they'll have it working soon.

Just someone that does want to see Lua more popular - what are you referring to as a resurgence? Following hacker news I don't tend to see much Lua at all at least

Metatables seem to be supported, have a look at benchmark/suites/mtvsclosure.lua

Of course metatables are supported, it wouldn't be much of a Lua without them. Luerl is standard Lua 5.2 except for coroutines.

I think "Erlu" rolls off the tongue a bit easier.

You can even just concatenate the names. Erlanglua (sounds like a Finnish born Roman Emperor).

The name was the hard bit, elua was already taken, erlua sounds funny and erlanglua is so long. So it became luerl.

I wonder if Robert Virding is just happy to implement another language on Erlang after his efforts on LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang), or is it going to be a complete, and very usable Lua implementation? So the Lua implementation is written in Erlang, no need for a Windows .dll or Linux .so? Very cool. He's a true language nut :)

Yes, I am a language nut :-) and I like to implement languages. It is a very complete Lua implementation in that it supports all of Lua 5.2 except for coroutines and many of the standard libraries. There is of course a good erlang interface and it is easy to write more interface modules to things written in Erlang.

The default usage is more to call Lua from erlang to do things, much like from C to the standard implementation.

It is actually being used in products.

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