Lilush – LuaJIT static runtime and shell | Hacker News Reader

Lilush – LuaJIT static runtime and shell

lilush.link

47 pointsksymph15 comments

I find it quite interesting how particular languages seem to disproportionally attract specific kinds of projects.

From a first glance, this is the second somewhat opinionated, compact, minimal-dependency interpreter/shell/library bundle despite the Lua(JIT) ecosystem being tiny. The other example I have in mind for this would've been luapower, which sadly became somewhat inactive.

I really like the simplicity of the language and the speed and compactness of its implementation. The JIT is also the real deal, with millisecond cold start execution delays unlike Julia, which masquerades as a JIT/interpreted language while featuring dog slow (by comparison) LLVM ("pre-")compilation under the hood (core language, type system, package management and interoperability concepts are admittedly nice in Julia though).

Also loosely related: Redbean is a webserver in a single-file that runs natively on six OSes for both AMD64 and ARM64

https://redbean.dev/

This is what culture is right? Different sorts of people are attracted to different sorts of things and so the culture that builds around those things is somewhat self reinforcing. Lua's culture mirrors its core and attracts people who like simple extensible solutions to problems. This looks like a pretty compelling simple extensible tool. Hopefully the development continues and doesn't drop off like Luapower. I do wish it had first class fennel support but that's really easy to add.

I've been working on it since 2022, and so far there are no plans to stop the development, given that it's my daily driver shell and scripting tool.

Another one - LuaTurbo:

https://turbo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Lua, with batteries included, like a swiss army knife ..

Lua is designed for the use case of being embedded.

> "Lua: an extensible embedded language"

https://www.lua.org/ddj.html

Does this run on bare metal? Are there any plans to include graphics primitives?

As another comment suggested, Lua seems to lend itself to certain kinds of projects. This looks like it could mesh well with my forever project to rewrite userland in Love2d!

You can use SDL3 with LuaJIT easily. You just need an FFI generator, I use the one here: https://github.com/sonoro1234/LuaJIT-SDL3

Speaking about "batteries included" LuaJIT, people might be interested in https://franko.github.io/gsl-shell

I second this recommendation. For those interested, this is “An interactive application for maths and graphics based on the Lua programming language and the GNU Scientific Library.” for both Windows and Linux. I installed it and keep a shortcut on my Windows desktop for quick calculations.

https://github.com/franko/gsl-shell

Another one, which I've used quite productively - TurboLua:

https://turbo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This looks very interesting. It says it has networking, cryptography, etc. Is there any documentation of the APIs? I can't try this out if I don't know what they are.

There is now: https://docs.lilush.link Will be more + user guides

Thanks for the update!

https://codeberg.org/latimar/lilush/src/branch/master/INDEX....

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