Tagging this “c”, “games”, “lua” and “zig” seems spammy to me. It has a C embedding API, I guess you can write games in it, it’s faster than Lua and it uses Zig in its build system? That doesn’t mean the post is about any of those things, though.
This seems like an attempt to jam together a language a bit like go and python with good performance.
It’s not obvious that there’s anything really new here, but it seems like a worthy language and implementation that could get traction if it had a killer app.
I think folks hope their excellent C embedding will make them the next glue scripting language. So it’s not that their language is by itself a killer app, but that it enables the composition of existing killer apps (or killer libraries) written in C and intended to be embedded. For cases like this I kind of feel like the world has decided that Lua is good enough, performance wise. Is anybody’s use case for this sort of thing held back by Lua performance? Maybe, I dunno. For my money “indexes begin at zero” and “syntax that feels familiar” and maybe “a standard library that feels familiar” would be bigger selling points.
These are good points. On the contrary though, it might not be enough to promote syntax if the language was noticeably slower. At least people don’t have worry too much about that. I also think with the addition of async and gas mileage (both planned features) it brings more use cases that lua doesn’t bring.
I also agree with the killer app suggestion, maybe not killer but at least having something that is driving the language at least shows that it usable.
High performance, Python-like syntax and good C interop sounds like a dream. Am wondering though why the -- syntax for comments? It seems gratuitous, and makes the shebang an exception in the syntax.
Tagging this “c”, “games”, “lua” and “zig” seems spammy to me. It has a C embedding API, I guess you can write games in it, it’s faster than Lua and it uses Zig in its build system? That doesn’t mean the post is about any of those things, though.
The genius about lobste.rs tags is the more you apply the more people filter…
This seems like an attempt to jam together a language a bit like go and python with good performance.
It’s not obvious that there’s anything really new here, but it seems like a worthy language and implementation that could get traction if it had a killer app.
I think folks hope their excellent C embedding will make them the next glue scripting language. So it’s not that their language is by itself a killer app, but that it enables the composition of existing killer apps (or killer libraries) written in C and intended to be embedded. For cases like this I kind of feel like the world has decided that Lua is good enough, performance wise. Is anybody’s use case for this sort of thing held back by Lua performance? Maybe, I dunno. For my money “indexes begin at zero” and “syntax that feels familiar” and maybe “a standard library that feels familiar” would be bigger selling points.
Right, if Luajit isn’t fast enough ahead of time compilation is probably what you want.
These are good points. On the contrary though, it might not be enough to promote syntax if the language was noticeably slower. At least people don’t have worry too much about that. I also think with the addition of async and gas mileage (both planned features) it brings more use cases that lua doesn’t bring.
I also agree with the killer app suggestion, maybe not killer but at least having something that is driving the language at least shows that it usable.
High performance, Python-like syntax and good C interop sounds like a dream. Am wondering though why the
--syntax for comments? It seems gratuitous, and makes the shebang an exception in the syntax.That was influenced by Lua. It looks more uniform than double slashes and it’s easier on the eyes.