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Comment by a1o | Hacker News Reader

Uhm, I remember LuaJIT used to be frozen in Lua 5.1, is it still the case or is it now synced to the latest Lua release?

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I think the LuaJIT maintainers have some issues with recent additions to the language, and with the direction that the Lua team has taken. So yes, frozen to 5.1 for the foreseeable future except for some features from more recent versions.

I can't seem to find any information about this. What issues did LuaJIT maintainers have with upstream Lua?

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/929

> the real issues of the language

> irrelevant or not-well-thought-out features

Looking for specific examples of these. The scoped finalization construct cited in a sibling comments is a great example of this. Are there more?

The issue linked in the sibling comment is the main one, but for a specific example of them having reservations about a feature in a more recent version, there's this:

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/1013#issuecomment-16...

That's an awesome example, thank you. I'm making my own language and it's hard to overstate how thorny the evaluator and call stack code can get once seemingly neat features are added. I'll try to avoid making the same mistakes. I agree with him that implicit scopes for resource management serve no purpose in a dynamic language.

Oh wow, from Mike Pall himself (I know he "retired" from the maintainer position but glad he is still providing guidance (and then some id imagine))

Seeing a project and a community functioning like this is simply inspiring.

I think we can concede that there is a legitimate language fork here. I personally was not all that happy with the extent of the changes in 5.3. I would be just as happy at 5.1.

It seems like each version of lua is kind of a separate language.

Wikipedia is also sticking to lua 5.1 with no plans to change (they do not use luajit but normal lua)

> It seems like each version of lua is kind of a separate language.

In Lua's versioning scheme, each 0.1 increment is a new major version. That means Lua 5.1 => 5.2 => 5.3 => 5.4 is similar to Python 2 => 3 => 4 => 5.

I believe it is mostly still the case, but some features from newer Lua revisions have been added.

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