I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.
The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no
continuestatement, the file was a long series ofif / elseblocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.
Anyway, that’s all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.
That’s a pretty crazy use of Lua if I may say so.
It is possible to craft
continue-like logic in lua, however, with (out of all things)gotostatements.For example, I have the following code in my dotfiles:
for _, lang in pairs(loopvar) do if condition then goto continue end <do whatever the loop actually does> ::continue:: endOf course the
continuecould be called anything. Really felt uncomfortable resorting to this way but it is possible :-)I did my first game in BASIC with thousands of IF/ELSE when I was like 11, good to know that experience is directly transferable!
Is there even an ecosystem? I don’t think I have heard of anything for Lua itself, just the stuff that embed it.
There is. luarocks is basically the “pip” equivalent for lua, it installs packages (called “rocks”) and manages dependencies. These packages can extend lua with all sorts of practical capabilities.
Ruby on Rails. 🚂🚃🚋🚃
trams when?
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My Lua experience is about 15 years old at this point, but back then I recall Luarocks had like 10 packages that were actually stable and maintained. Basically a ghost town. I’m gonna guess it hasn’t gotten much better.
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I kinda got a bad taste from LUA when I was introduced to it via it being added in GMOD. It quickly led to me quitting the game because through it, you had remote control access possibilities just by running into the wrong player.
Like, I know that’s not common but it took a while to actually learn it after that lol
Can you expand on that?
I was running a tiny bit of garrsymod many years ago and didn’t know there were any RCEs. Unfortunately I can’t find any news reports talking about it either at a quick glance?
When LUA scripting was first added to the game it had basically no guard rails and it was possible to write up LUA scripts that could download and execute files on your machine from within the game.
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Only ever used it with WoW addons. Arrays starting with 1 is so annoying
Lua is cozy, like a nice, warm dumpster fire.
