Where Lua Is Actually Used

[@RunYouWont]

Lua is also used in opencomputers and computercraft (mods for minecraft) its pretty cool

[@hri7566]

that's how i was introduced, i didn't understand it at the time i later rediscovered it when i found love2d

[@dsptchr]

Came here to say this, brother 🫂

[@nathaaaaaa]

It's awesome because they wrote an entire operating system in Lua... Twice! There's another very old computer mod called "Redpower" it's long gone now, but it's very interesting because it used the language FORTH

[@lowlight1063]

Michael Reeves approved also!

[@TOZA]

@@nathaaaaaa Its now called 'Project Red' - but If I remember correctly they removed it - and also i liked Redpower more than Project Red.

[@nodidog]

I believe Lua is mostly used to bother programmers who are used to zero-based indexing

[@Brick_Soup]

Out of the few programming languages I've messed with, I'm most familiar with lua just from messing with Roblox studio.

[@tortellini_soup]

Seems like that’s the most common introduction to the language, at least from what I’ve seen.

[@AyzeLYC]

​​@@tortellini_soup it's also used by GMOD, GMOD2 ( S&Box ) and FiveM

[@calengo454]

roblox's lua (Luau) has added the continue keyword and it lacks in raw lua. it's really unfortunate, i can't live without a continue keyword personally. i find it hilarious that the most recent versions of lua added a "goto" keyword instead of adding it

[@tortellini_soup]

@@calengo454 I suppose the reason goto was added instead of continue is because goto provides a superset of functionality to continue.

[@silitome3086]

@@tortellini_soup the biggest difference is Typechecking.

[@DanniDuck]

All of the game scripts for Warframe are written in Lua. Quests, mods, everything, calling into C++ functions. The bindings are generated by something called SWIG. They recently switched from normal Lua to Luau. For security, they fnv1a hash all of the function names, because of me btw lmao.

[@MeBloxboy305]

More on Love2D, it is the engine used in Balatro which is a pretty popular indie game made by a solo dev, was the first time I heard of Love2D

[@zhitaburnurli9631]

Techmino too, made using Love2d.

[@lukkkasz323]

I remember an old Portal / Mario game called Mari0. I think it used LOVE2d too.

[@TheLTak3r]

Move or die too

[@perguto]

Blue Revolver might be the best one in my opinion!

[@longbranch4493]

It is a very important lesson, I guess. Users don't care what engine you used and how well-written the code is. They only care about WHAT you have created.

[@user-tc2ky6fg2o]

Lua is used on Texas Instruments' graphical calculator called Nspire. You can write interactive applications or functions for students (or for yourself) on the PC-side program, which then can be distributed and run on handhelds. Recently (around 2021) TI added a Python support too (a limited version). So now you can program these calculators with TI-Basic, Lua, and Python.

[@CapsAdmin]

Garrysmod and Lua got me into programming. I've used Lua for around 15 years now, and I still love it just as much as I did from the beginning.

[@meowyahh]

damn i meet capsadmin in the wild!

[@Calypso694]

good thing this showed up in my feed. was about to give up learning it for a final project of a small sample game.

[@dariofagotto4047]

Introduced Lua to a scripting system to handle interlocking and signal logic for train infrastructure simulation, literally the simplest thing to just throw in with a short timeframe and be working

[@con_roxp]

My first contact with Lua was 3 years ago via the script files in STALKER Anomaly mods. Back then the only thing I could do was to compare these files in conflicting mods and make them compatible. Now I'm a Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate and (in order to avoid confusion) once I'm confident enough in C and C++, I'll start branching out to other languages, including Lua.

[@MaxPewpew]

„I dont have time to make Snake in Lua or Python“ proceeds to read some reddit thread. Result very good time managment

[@h44k4]

Lua (mostly LuaJIT because of it's ffi module) is very broadly used in hacks/cheats for games. Particularly in CS:GO it can do some pretty fun stuff - the community managed to implement countless features not targeting towards gaining an advantage - you can apply custom postprocessing effects, use custom models & textures for EVERYTHING, modify the user interface as you want, spawn random effects/objects and so on. It's really fun when you dig into the rabbit hole, but sadly Valve deprecated CS:GO

[@elbeesmacros]

yeah i miss using Gamesense and just messing around with their api, i remember they had a whole niche community of scripters who liked to do the same thing.

[@beqa2758]

Idk about cheats but csgo was using Squirrel language for scripting, and dota 2 is using lua

[@EduardoEscarez]

Also Lua is integrated in the international version of the Japanese ISDB television standard, ISDB-Tb, though the Ginga middleware. That happened because of Brazil's interest on ISDB, so with Japan they developed an export version of ISDB with the ability of running mini-applications for a compatible TV (now being extended to offer smart TV capabilities), and they use Lua because both were developed in the same place, PUC-Rio. And their use is not restricted only in Brazil, due to most of South and Central America (with the exception of Colombia), some Asian and African nations use ISDB-Tb as their digital TV standard.

[@somenameidk5278]

Don't Starve Together uses it too, not only is it's modding API in Lua, most of the base game minus the performance-critical engine stuff is too, which makes it really easy to mod. When you want to do something similar to something already in the game, or you are confused about how certain parts of the API work, you can just look at the game's code and check! This also lets them get away with having zero documentation for their modding APIs, and allows you to mess with stuff without needing the devs to build an API for it.

[@shroomer3867]

If you pull up the console in Don't Starve you can see it using Lua.command or something like that, haven't played in a long while but yeah, also it's used in neovim configuration files but that's another can of worms. It seems easy enough where you can just infer how it should work if you know other languages.

[@nullpointer1755]

Also Project Zomboid.

[@distantforest2481]

A super popular game right now Helldivers 2 uses Stingray/Bitsquid; a Lua based game engine. The game engine itself has been discontinued, but the developers has access to the code so it's pretty much a proprietary engine at this point. Vermintide, another game built in the same engine, has apparently more than 1 million lines of Lua code.

[@frajola_br]

I use lua in my java applications. Like a seperate file for configs and things like that

[@jupiterbjy]

Kinda remembered that I had to use lua when porting some MMD model into GMod decade ago, so source engines probably used those too, which is kinda interesting.

[@wackynix171]

I actually really like the syntax lua uses, it reads really literally ("IF this THEN do that END" for example) and some of my favorite games use it so thats a plus too

[@christopheroliver148]

The neat thing is that with the genericity of closures and tables, Lua is a lot like Scheme with a Pascal syntax. As someone who's hacked on Scheme with a small bit of Lisp and Smalltalk, I find Lua a very comfy place to work.

[@bhavyakukkar]

@@christopheroliver148 i've always gotten lisp-y vibes from lua but i could never put my finger on it

[@SteelSkin667]

Speaking of Roblox, Luau (Roblox's language and runtime) seems to be gaining in popularity for game development. Remedy uses it for scripting in Northlight, and so does Digital Extremes for Warframe.

[@palmberry5576]

I mean, it makes sense. Luau’s type system combined with upcoming features such as native codegen make it a really fun language. In addition, lua is fairly easy to embed which lowers the barrier to entry

[@mikastrae]

@@palmberry5576 Luau also provides a lot of major performance increases over normal Lua and other really helpful features natively added in

[@RegahP]

One of my favorite games, Starbound, is actually ENTIRELY constructed in Lua. I've modded it before, also with Lua. AFAIK, it's all Lua.

[@galacticdragon9841]

Torch (the library PyTorch is based on) was made in lua.

[@davidmurphy563]

Really? I'm not sure that's true. I think there was a LuaTorch and it's descending from that. I could be wrong though.

[@Hexcede]

Fun fact, Warframe actually uses luau now, not just lua. It's pronounced kind of like lu-wow by the way (like the Hawaiian word luau). Luau is pretty interesting compared to many other custom lua versions. It's sort of like Roblox's LuaJIT but with lots of features backported from newer lua versions, and it's more than just the type system by far. It's a more sandboxed version of lua (lacking direct OS level access, though you can add it back in very easily if desired) with a significant number of performance improvements and additions, such as a native vector type, buffers (basically a C character array internally that you can use for extremely high performance scenarios, it's like a chunk of memory you can directly read/write from high level lua code and is actually faster than lua tables in some cases!), a type inference system (which is admittedly not very good, Rust/TypeScript have spoiled me), and more. It has lots of lua 5.3 and 5.4 backports, and without JIT performs comparably to LuaJIT. It is also getting its own JIT which is currently in a fully working state and can be accessed in Roblox Studio (but isn't enabled in live games presumably because they are still actively testing and making improvements). Buffers are *by far* my favorite luau feature. They are extremely light, extremely fast, and extremely easy to use. They allow for extremely high performance (particularly with the JIT enabled, which they were designed for afaik and have full inlining and such) and are really good for processing custom binary formats. Lune is a tool made in Rust by some Roblox developers which runs Luau (via the Rust mlua crate) and emulates a small portion of the Roblox APIs, letting you interact with rbxm (Roblox model) files and such, but it also just generally is a useful scripting tool. I have used it for prototyping stuff and making bash-like scripts for Luau/Roblox projects and such but it's generally just very useful even without the Roblox stuff.

[@tortellini_soup]

Cool, appreciate the explanation! I’ll look more into it soon.

[@darioferretti3758]

Started to use lua to mod trailmakers, it's probably my favourite language, i only wish it had the recognition of python (aka all those libraries) given how good it is (i am not a big python fan)

[@tortellini_soup]

Yeah, the lack of libraries is its main disadvantage.

[@Hexcede]

@@tortellini_soup The Roblox space actually has a TON of libraries that they've made that would work well outside of Roblox when using luau. The wally package manager provides a ton of Roblox APIs. It's unfortunately not the easiest to use them, but there are tools like darklua (reminiscent of webpack) which can transpile Roblox requires into string requires (which luau supports outside of the Roblox engine) and this allows them to (mostly) work. With Lune, even more libraries work, but the number is still limited. Lune would at least allow you to more easily construct a compatibility layer for these libraries if you are not looking to use them in a production environment.

[@uremi.]

@@Hexcede What can i use Lune for? its for desktop apps? or what else? I also would like to know about these good libraries

[@mikastrae]

I got into Lua through Roblox but I heavily fell in love with it quickly. It's often embedded with C or Python, so it goes along games extremely well. Ive noticed that it's really good to program quick and small files, such as UI files, easily and with very little performance overhead. To answer the question, Lua is also used in Tabletop Simulator as its coding language for its tables. It's also very easy to understand and pick up, so it's always been a delight coding in it

[@jordanjackson6151]

Love 2D mentioned! My intro to programming as a whole. Yeah. It's a framework. But respect...!m!

[@reikoow]

Garry's Mod LUA (gLUA), all the addons works with LUA, and it's so cool to use it for some reason

[@jan_harald]

luau is the roblox fork of lua, fyi it's very performance and sandboxing oriented, it's compatible with lua5.1 but further than that, due to performance and sandboxing concerns, they only implement SOME newer stuff, and 5.1-compatibility-breaking things are not considered it's typed, it's more compiled (multi-pass compiler for better bytecode), it's essentially rewritten from scratch it's...kinda more of a sibling, than just a normal "modified version" at this point, same family, but quite significantly different

[@Hexcede]

Buffers are a pretty game changing feature of luau as well

[@TakinProfit]

Surprised no one mentioned DaVinci Resolve Plugins.

[@AgentLayla526]

Lua is used in Foundry Katana, which is an industry-level 3D lighting program. First thing that comes to my mind that uses it is the Spiderverse series.

[@pancakemeow]

LUA is also often used as the scripting language in cheats

[@disk0__]

Don't think mpv came up. It's a video player written in C with lua (and javascript) bindings. The core UI elements are all drawn with built in lua scripts. There's plenty of custom control interfaces people have hacked together for specific needs, e.g. EQ, tone curves, projection, etc. There's even a REPL, I have my own fork with extended autocompletions and fennel support B)

[@3dz3dz]

reading those conversations about lua in the discord server (where most people had no idea what they were talking about) made me want to dive head first into a deep frier.

[@tortellini_soup]

This is how it is with most conversations there, let’s be honest.

[@christopheroliver148]

I had to read the thread as I wasn't sure I had posted to that one or not. I've stuck my nose into several similar posts. I tend to think of Lua as the skeleton of a programming language that one extends with bits and pieces during application development. I've been messing around with LuaJIT for the past twelve years, and it's just a very handy thing as much for its FFI (e.g. I have a small script that calls out to mmap directly) as its speed. I committed enough to the platform that when I see a nice library or subsystem like a database engine, I look to see if someone's already written Lua support for it. My first serious application was a backenbd for the LPRng print queuing system. The low level stuff that slung and retrieve bytes from the PostScript printers was in C, but the top level logic was in LuaJIT. These days, being a lot more comfy with LuaJIT's FFI than I was at the start, I suspect I could even do most of the I/O stuff in LuaJIT and ditch a lot of the C code.. Quick note: Iguana starts with a capital I, not a lower case l. The system is named after medium sized lizard.

[@thomasstringer6652]

Shoutout to my fellow QSYS programmers! 🙌

[@FoxBall47]

lua is my 'first love' when it comes to programming languages, and remains my all time favourite. like others i also learned it for use in roblox, which i still use it for to this day, other notable thing ive done with it is writing a custom PID controller for an educational industrial robot (festo's "robotino"). it is my go to language when i want to think my way through a concept thanks to its unmatched ease of use.

[@Palawusa]

We use ESP8266's with NodeMcu at work. Pretty nice when you can do updates on the fly, rather then flashing them each manually via usb.

[@ukcroupier]

Nobody mentioned Defold? It's a great free open source game engine.

[@tortellini_soup]

Not sure how I and others missed that. I've used Defold for several years. 🤔

[@Populous3Tutorials]

Hades videogame

[@UliTroyo]

Lua is a great config language! If an app is complex enough to need scripting, it’s a solid choice.

[@no_name4796]

100% true. I use lua for the nelvim editor, and boy it's fucking good

[@crashniels]

Factorio mods are also written using Factorio Lua. OpenWRT webinterface also uses Lua.

[@jocelyn-n-tech]

I first learned about it from writing Neovim plugins.

[@embeddedbastler6406]

Where I've seen Lua in the past: - scripting language for MagicLantern, a custom DSLR firmware extension - scripting language for the wiremod of Garry's mod - scripting language for Multi Theft Auto (MTA) servers - scripting language for The Settlers 5 maps

[@Wyrmver]

wiremod e2 is its own thing as far as i know

[@drachenfliger1368]

Lighting consoles from the German manufacturer MA lighting, use lua Plugins/ programs/ macros. (They are probably the most used lighting consol on tours) edit: just seen, that this is already in vid

[@nespidev]

Lua is the main language in TIC-80, a fantasy computer similar to PICO-8, but open source.

[@jaszczurka5069]

the only thing that I don't like about lua is installing things like modules or for modules(at least it was hard on windows)

[@tortellini_soup]

Agreed. Well, that and arrays being 1-indexed. 🤦‍♀️

[@AviatorXD]

Ive heard that alot of game devs use it for writing UI components.

[@stardust-kyun]

I use Lua for my desktop made with AwesomeWM, and it's a fantastic language!

[@defenestratorr]

Everything should use Lua, tbh It’s literally just easier and WAY faster python, what’s not to love??

[@crism8868]

Arrays starting at index 1 is too much of an adjustment for devs lol

[@palmberry5576]

⁠@@crism8868hm, I wonder if that fact gets used as an optimization by prefixing the arrays with some data so that you get the benefit of pointer arithmetic and get to store metadata for “free”

[@happygofishing]

@QuickMathsToday JS was a mistake.

[@mikastrae]

@@crism8868 With lua being my first and primary language, I struggle with the opposite. I keep forgetting that it's abnormal to have arrays start at 1, despite that it does make logical sense in a readable way. Lua is great for quickly readable code but I do wish it started at 0 myself

[@Hexcede]

@@crism8868 I don't have problems with it, I use languages which start at 0 and 1 both. It's pretty easy to work with, because the cases where it matters actually don't really come up that often and they're easy to correct with a + 1 or - 1 with zero extra thought. From there it's both easy (takes a few seconds at worst) for you to simplify that away There are actually a large number of 1 indexed languages other than lua by the way

[@girishjain5288]

im using it to create something like manim

[@ricardokullock2535]

@@girishjain5288 How far are you in this? Link the repo here?

[@novantha1]

Lua is way more robust than people give it credit for: - Lua's actually more useful than Python in *some* machine learning situations because it's easier to interface custom device kernels written in c/c++ with Lua. - Lua has native support for Love2D, so it's really easy to make reasonable applications in. - - Btw you can extend Love2D with support for simple 3D shaders pretty easily. - Lua has actually really good web development libraries, and can natively run on top of NGINX (which is essentially Lua IIRC), which makes it a really streamlined system for certain types of web development. - Lua isn't terrible for command line utilities (Rust is probably better, but if you need something really fast Lua's fine) - Lua lets you use a lot of classic C / C++ utilities (SDL, Ncurses, and so on, to name a few) which aren't as ergonomic to use in modern development natively if you're not super keyed into handling unsafe languages.

[@leo28804]

It isn't a popular option, but I have used it for Web development too using lapis

[@bm1259]

The only time Ive heard of lua being used is for scripting when writing Tool Assisted Speedruns this was when I was like 8 lmao.

[@jan_harald]

lua

[@tortellini_soup]

Yep, Lua docs are objectively lacking and a bit unorganized.

[@jan_harald]

@@tortellini_soup also, instead of third-party libraries, I think main reason why lua isn't used much for general scripting, is FIRST-party library support, or rather, lack of python stdlib includes basically everything you would ever need, down to parsing html and reading and sending email lua *doesn't even have a string splitting* function as part of stdlib, you have to do it yourself, similarly for a lot of other stuff, it may not be "hard", but you either have to get a third-party "batteries included" library (and decide which one of them), and swap between lua docs and library docs, or re-implement a lot of little (and not-so-little) functions you'd take for granted in other languages

[@cariyaputta]

50% of my github usage is Lua, and all of them are from Linux and Neovim config. Dota 2, StarCraft 2, and WarCraft 3 (Jass is a Lua clone that directly interops with Wc3 objects) also using Lua as their modding language.

[@nathaaaaaa]

Lua and Elixir are Brazilian pride

[@memes_gbc674]

lua is an incredibly simple language and a lot of people like it because of its metatables

[@Kitsune_Dev]

I use Lune a Luau runtime regularly to create programs for automating repetitive tasks and speed up my workflow Unfortunately very difficult to find a job with just Lua experience

[@rubidium1948]

I think where it meets in the middle between Python’s readability and ease-of-use and C’s ease-to-embed and low-level nature acts makes it easier to learn one of those two after starting with Lua, since either one of them are much more employable.

[@execute214]

yeah, well, Lua is a scripting language.

[@LinguisticMirage]

In my game engine i wanted to use C# as the scripting language but lua is just way easier than C# imo. I still dont know what im doing and its missing a ton of stuff atm

[@mihailmojsoski4202]

embedding C# is a pain in the ass because it's massive and has a GC. for JITed C# your main function will have to be written in C# and you need to call the native code using [DllImport]. for AOTed C# you can do whatever the fuck you want (because you can compile to a native .so or .dll file) but you lose some optimizations the JIT provides

[@darkwoodmovies]

The only time I've ever heard of Lua, in any context, was because World of Warcraft mods used it (or still do, IDK).

[@alexandreramos8484]

LaTeX uses Lua

[@benhuangbmj]

I was surprised that LuaLaTeX or LuaTeX was not mentioned among all those use cases🤣🤣🤣

[@davidmurphy563]

Superman uses Lua? Who knew?

[@papakamirneron2514]

I think that lua needs to be able to seriously compete with mojo now that that’s out since easy integration and cheap interpretation are now its only competitive advantages.

[@Ozzianman]

Worms Ultimate Mayhem uses LUA.

[@BellatrixLugosi]

Game Guardian and NodeMCU. Well, it's not a lot. Lua really needs attention because there are no plugins like in Python. It's more like a simplistic DIY scripting language

[@hedgehogform]

I think Huawei uses lua under the hood in some of their routers.

[@rhogal8310]

One day at like 4 AM I suddenly decided I have to read up on lua. I come from a strongly typed compiled languages background like C# C or Rust so I am not that fond of dynamically typed scripting languages. But lua came off to me as super simple and super fun to code in with some very original design paradigms. I used it only once to write a script for Open Computers a Minecraft mod that adds... computers. It used coroutines and interfaced with another mod (AE2) to make requests for autocrafting of items that I wanted to stockpile.

[@johanngambolputty5351]

Game engine/framework are synonymous to me, its the core low level common parts of many games, and those parts (scene hierarchy, renderer) will be present (in some form) in the produced executable, an editor will not, an editor is just part of the build tooling. Hell, the word "framework" might be more all encompassing (in my mind) and could include more than the engine, think body/shell/frame of a car, versus the actual "engine". I guess less ambiguously, the editor is part of the sdk, which is more like the robot that assembled the car.

[@tortellini_soup]

Semantics man, yeah. I guess people kind of see it similarly to the difference between a kernel and an OS: the kernel is the thing that provides the core functionality, while the OS includes batteries like display software and important applications.

[@Kīīng-Skull]

Well even Moho Animator plugins are made with Lua 😊😊

[@DerSolinski]

Where is Lua used? Literally almost everywhere you need a glue layer, and stuff isn't to complicated. (Basically when it's irrelevant that the user is a moron) It's so tiny that in the grand scheme of things you often don't even know it's included at all. But it gets slowly superseded by python, even if Lua is still the better choice in most cases.

[@defectivenull]

do you intend on making your own discord server at some point?

[@tortellini_soup]

I don’t have much of a reason to at the moment. Right now I just enjoy making videos.

[@defectivenull]

@@tortellini_soup i see.

[@TheOisannNetwork]

You skipped the FiveM comment. It's a tool to host GTA 5 servers, Rockstar bought it last year.

[@davidmurphy563]

It's for Project Zomboid. All other uses aren't worth reporting. ;)

[@bhavyakukkar]

i'd say the opposite. all the other uses are more relevant than whatever that is

[@davidmurphy563]

You disagree despite having no clue what I'm referring to. Impressive.

[@bhavyakukkar]

@@davidmurphy563 right, sorry, didn't know you're aware of every single place lua is used in besides Project Zomboid

[@davidmurphy563]

Why? Is there another project that trumps granting all humanity eternal life?

[@davidmurphy563]

What an absolute muppet. Takes a joke about a game he's never heard of and tries to correct it...

[@theroza31]

the downvote on "Where you least expect it" 😭😭😭

[@lonelyshpee7873]

My NeoVim config :)

[@kdt85]

Watchmaker!

[@HughBone]

Nobody talking about lumah 😢

[@aviate68]

All i know is X-Plane mods use them.

[@Davi_Dash]

Angry birds

[@mukeenanyafiq]

basically.... Lua is actually commonly used on Roblox.

[@scarm_rune]

love2d i guess

[@ikec-pw5sb]

...do FNF Mods count?

[@gustavojoaquin_arch]

I use it for neovim xd

[@hghlndr2]

Lua comes from Brazil... used in Roblox

[@GKinWor]

factorio

[@triangleenjoyer]

DCS World

[@影-影]

neovim config

[@didi098710]

World of Warcraft

[@pinguluk1]

Dota2

[@sunofabeach9424]

Lua has been used in many games, games, and also games And as much as I love Lua, its C API is terrible