Hacker News Reader

Comment by hgyjnbdet | Hacker News Reader

I've been wanting to pick up lua for ages. My only issue, as always, is where to start. Is there a runtime I can install where I can start creating with lua? Cross platform, windows and Linux? That will allow someone with no c/c++ experience to start doing stuff with it?

View on HN

There are also "fantasy consoles". Most of them use Lua+their own api for dealing with the virtual console internals.

* PICO-8 (paid, 8$) https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

* TIC80 (opensource, supports more langs like python, scheme, so on) https://tic80.com/

Have fun!

Perhaps redbean might be of interest? It's a web server with all the batteries included, scripted via lua.

https://redbean.dev/

Love2D is popular (https://love2d.org/)

Also Lua binaries are available here (https://luabinaries.sourceforge.net/)

And a big list of Lua frameworks (https://github.com/uhub/awesome-lua)

I'd suggest working with LuaJIT as well because of the C API (you can easily use something like SDL and build metatypes around them) with the caveat that it's stuck at an older version of Lua[0,1].

[0] https://luajit.org/

[1] https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT

I have used Lua a long time ago and I don't remember ever touching C/C++. You can even make simple games without ever going low level thanks to https://love2d.org/! If I recall, most https://stabyourself.net/ games are based on Love2d.

If you're using Linux/MacOS, you can copy-paste these commands on the terminal and you should be settled:

  curl -L -R -O https://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.6.tar.gz
  tar zxf lua-5.4.6.tar.gz
  cd lua-5.4.6
  make all test

You should find the lua executable inside the lua-5.4.6/src folder.

I would start at https://lua.org/

I'm creating a set of libraries to make Lua into a (still lightweight) application language

https://github.com/civboot/civlua

Reply on news.ycombinator.com