Lua 5.4.0 (work1) is now available | Hacker News Reader

Lua 5.4.0 (work1) is now available

13 pointscatwell4 comments

This is the first pre-release for the next version of Lua.

The email announcement from Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo is not yet in the archive, so I reproduce it here:

Lua 5.4.0 (work1) is now available for testing at http://www.lua.org/work/lua-5.4.0-work1.tar.gz

The checksums are MD5 0ff232b8658884155a43cf72212edbd9 - SHA1 a8193b14ed3869917d1102cb0418cf9dfb0d9baf -

This is a work version. All details may change in the final version.

An updated reference manual is included and also available at http://www.lua.org/work/doc

The complete diffs from Lua 5.3 are too extensive to show.

A test suite is available at http://www.lua.org/work/lua-5.4.0-work1-tests.tar.gz

All feedback welcome. Thanks. --lhf

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From the manual: http://www.lua.org/work/doc/#changes

> new generational mode for garbage collection

(!)

> userdata can have multiple user values

> debug information about function arguments and returns

> new implementation for math.random

It's Xorshift128+, instead of random() or rand().

From observing what has happened to Lua 5.1.5, LuaJIT, Lua 5.x.x>5.1.5, Python 2, and Python 3, it appears to me (with my limited experience in software development) that languages grow to mature to a peak where they provide their most value and productivity into languages which don't stop growing. These languages eventually prune productivity gains due to API breakage and library severance across major versions, to the point where their ecosystems become disparate.

I'm not sure I see the benefits of using anything beyond Lua 5.1.5/LuaJIT these days in game development. I'm not sure what the status of version adoption is beyond this particular field, but I contribute and participate in open source Lua-based game development projects to such an extent that I see the same names over and over again and have these people on my friends lists across different platforms.

A lot of these folks are all also still using LuaJIT, which has kept much of the community from moving forward, because if you're _not_ using it, you're missing out on some significant performance gains which are very relevant in gamedev.

LuaJIT is indeed a big draw, but it also has a bunch of 5.2 features, esp goto. 5.3 brought integers which is awesome because 64 bit datatypes can round trip through Lua will full fidelity.

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