Software Alternatives & Reviews

Lua: The Little Language That Could

LOVE 2D Audulus Lapis WebContainers.io StackBlitz Mako Server GNU Guix mruby OpenResty
  1. Hi there! LÖVE is an *awesome* framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua.
    Pricing:
    • Open Source
    Just gonna add to the Lua love. I was also introduced to it by LOVE2D and revisted it Redbean. In terms of ergonomics, it is still my favorite programming language; I find it very easy to read and reason about, and I credit that to its minimalism. [1] https://love2d.org/ [2] https://redbean.dev/.

    #Game Development #Game Engine #2D Game Engine 181 social mentions

  2. 2
    A multimedia sketchpad

    #Game Development #Game Engine #IDE 8 social mentions

  3. A universe of sound at your fingertips - Audulus is a modular music processing app
    I'm currently using Lua as an extension language in my app. Users can write their own custom UIs and DSP code. https://audulus.com.

    #Music #Audio & Music #Windows 10 social mentions

  4. 4
    A Lua/MoonScript web framework on top of OpenResty.
    > webserver (nginx) How timely! Right now I'm learning Lapis [1] by build a toy CRUD app that I plan on deploying to fly.io. Lua reminds me of Go insofar as it's a really "dumb" language. You can't get too cute and there are a few powerful abstractions that let you accomplish a lot. Coming from Python (which is an endless horizon of PEPs and build artifact standards and name mangling and kwargs and... well, you get the idea) it's kind of a breath of fresh air. [1] https://leafo.net/lapis/.

    #Slack #Peer-to-peer Recognition #Game Development 5 social mentions

  5. Build the future of web based coding experiences, from interactive tutorials to instant production-ready dev environments.
    Pricing:
    • Open Source
    > Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!). I was recently blown away by some ideas that StackBlitz [0] apply based on WebContainers. The idea of a "server in the browser", they allow you to run Node-based environment like that via Wasm. [0] https://stackblitz.com/ [1] https://webcontainers.io/.

    #Dev Ops #Product Deployment #Cloud IDE 4 social mentions

  6. Online VS Code Editor for Angular and React
    Pricing:
    • Open Source
    > Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!). I was recently blown away by some ideas that StackBlitz [0] apply based on WebContainers. The idea of a "server in the browser", they allow you to run Node-based environment like that via Wasm. [0] https://stackblitz.com/ [1] https://webcontainers.io/.

    #Text Editors #Programming #Programming Tools 98 social mentions

  7. The Mako Server is an application server with an API that loosely resembles the Java Servlet API...
    For anyone looking for a HTTP server, or a Lua runtime with batteries included, have a look at the Mako Server[1]. It's really wonderful to work with. I've automated my house based on it. It includes everything you may need , from JSON to TLS, email to websockets... All in a tiny 3MB binary, including the Lua interpreter!! I run it on a Raspberry Pi and the process takes around 3MB of RAM. Just unbelievable comparing to anything like Node.JS or Java which would require a few 100's MB. [1] https://makoserver.net.

    #Web And Application Servers #Application Server #Java 2 social mentions

  8. Like Nix but GNU.
    Pricing:
    • Open Source
    I think a "competitor" to Lua would be Guile [1], but I am not sure if it gets close to Lua in terms of lightweightness... It was designed to be used in the GNU project, with similar objects as Lua: to be light, easily embeddable. It's a Scheme (Lisp) so maybe not for everyone's taste... Its "coolest" use I know of is for configuring Guix [2] (the GNU version of Nix). [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ [2] https://guix.gnu.org.

    #Front End Package Manager #Package Manager #Developer Tools 90 social mentions

  9. 9
    Game Development
    Mruby[1] fits that category too. It can be used with H2O[2] server as well. There was a discussion here a couple of months ago regarding some use cases[3]. - [1] https://mruby.org.

    #Programming Language #Generic Programming Language #OOP 6 social mentions

  10. Turning Nginx into a Full-fledged Web App Server
    Mentioning Openresty[1] (nginx + Lua + LuaJIT) is a must. I have been running production code with Openresty for the last 15 years. Smooth sail. [1] https://openresty.org/en/.

    #Web And Application Servers #Web Servers #Application Server 19 social mentions

  11. 11
    Prosody is a modern flexible communications server for Jabber/XMPP written in Lua.
    Pricing:
    • Open Source
    There's also the http://prosody.im/ XMPP server that's written in Lua, and it's very successful there. The other major XMPP server implementation is in Erlang and they are equally praised, so that should tell something about Lua's versatility.

    #Group Chat & Notifications #Communication #Chat 15 social mentions

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