Ravi: A dialect of Lua with optional static typing and JIT

Ravi catches my interest, then frustrates me. The Lua 5.4* compatibility statement. “Well we’re 5.3, we forked 5.3 I don’t agree with a minor 5.4 detail so we’re stuck on 5.3” It’s similar to LuaJIT stuck on 5.1.

I don’t think it does the Lua world any favors to be stuck on so many versions. It causes extra work for library developers, makes for poor code samples, and confusion for new adopters. It’s not like Lua is moving quickly with versions either. Every ~5 years for a minor version?

*) yes I know 5.4 is brand new.

"My motivation is somewhat different - I want to enhance the VM to support more efficient operations when types are known. Type information can be exploited by JIT compilation technology to improve performance. At the same time, I want to keep the language safe and therefore usable by non-expert programmers."

Seems very promising. I will try it.

Astrologers proclaim the week of Lua. Amount of Lua-related posts doubles!

Anyone know how it compares to Luau, which is also on the front page right now?

This is a cool project, and I find the documentation quite useful. However, it is a tough sell to say that the JIT only works on the main stack, where almost none of my code is run.

I am...interested.