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Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

> We want to be able to traverse the AST for deeper analysis, so we need a parser to produce that syntax tree. From there, we’re free to perform any operations we wish to do on that AST.

Sounds to me like they are trying to reinvent python3 in lua. Why not embed python anyway?

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What had that quote got to do with Python3? In any case, Python is harder to embed and much slower.

Python has its own AST generator, type annotations and is embeddable easily via some helpers. Civilization 4 had it, so it isn't that uncommon. Not sure how fast it needs to perform once embedded, apparently you know.

Worth noting that Civilization 6 now embeds Lua instead.

> [Python] is embeddable easily via some helpers

You can embed Python, but making it safe to run untrusted code written by users will take enormous effort. Roblox is a platform for easily creating games and playing other people's games. They can't allow those games to pose a security risk to players' computers.

> Not sure how fast it needs to perform once embedded, apparently you know.

You're commenting this on a post that talks explicitly about wanting a faster interpreter than Lua 5.1. Nobody is switching from Lua to Python and getting better performance out of it.

> Why not embed python anyway?

Same reason TypeScript was created: to allow gradual typing in already-existing Lua codebases. Unless you mean adding it in addition to Lua, in which case, what advantages does that offer?

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