Introducing Lua

I have chosen to use Lua for my game projects, and therefore will share this wonderful script language with you. Lua is distributed from www.lua.org under MIT’s “liberal license,” which is far more open than even GPL or LGPL. You can download and freely distribute Lua, port it to new systems, and do whatever you want with it without license. Lua (pronounced LOO-ah) means “moon” in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun.

Lua is a name—the name of the Earth’s moon and the name of the language. Like most names, it should be written in lowercase with an initial capital—that is, Lua. Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It combines a procedural syntax with an associative array-based system for variables and has extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed and runs by interpreting bytecodes for a register-based virtual machine (similar to the way in which Java programs work). Lua has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection. It is a proven and robust language, used in industrial equipment and embedded systems, and it is the leading scripting language used in games.

Lua is fast! It is most likely the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages because it is based on the standard C library. Lua is portable, distributed in a small package that can be compiled for any platform that has an ANSI/ISO C compiler. Lua runs on all flavors of UNIX and Windows and on many mobile devices, such as BREW, Symbian, and Pocket PC. It also runs on embedded microprocessors, such as ARM. Lua is free, distributed under a liberal license, and can be used for any purpose (including commercial) at no cost. Lua was born and raised at Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Rio de Janeiro in Brazil).