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Luau VS JavaScript

Compare Luau VS JavaScript and see what are their differences

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Luau logo Luau

Fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua

JavaScript logo JavaScript

Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions
  • Luau Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • JavaScript Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-05

We recommend LibHunt JavaScript for discovery and comparisons of trending JavaScript projects.

Luau features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Luau is designed to be user-friendly, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced developers. Its syntax and structure are intuitive, allowing for quick learning and efficient coding.
  • Performance
    Luau is optimized for performance, ensuring that scripts run quickly and efficiently. This makes it suitable for applications that require high responsiveness and low latency.
  • Robust Typing System
    Luau includes an advanced static type system, providing optional type annotations that help catch errors early in the development process, leading to more reliable code.
  • Scalability
    It is designed to scale well in large projects, supporting the development of complex applications with clear and maintainable code bases.
  • Integration with Roblox
    As the scripting language used primarily for Roblox development, Luau offers seamless integration with the platform, benefiting game developers on that ecosystem.

Possible disadvantages of Luau

  • Limited Scope
    Luau is primarily focused on the Roblox platform, which may limit its use outside this environment. Developers looking for a more universally applicable script language might find this restrictive.
  • Young Language
    Being relatively new, Luau might lack some of the extensive libraries and community support that older languages benefit from, which can be a challenge for developers seeking resources and third-party tools.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite being designed for ease of use, developers accustomed to other scripting languages might encounter a learning curve when transitioning to Luau, particularly in understanding its unique features and optimizations.
  • Rapid Updates
    Luau's ongoing development can result in frequent updates, which may require developers to adapt quickly and ensure their projects remain compatible with the latest changes.

JavaScript features and specs

  • Wide Browser Support
    JavaScript is supported by all modern web browsers without the need for any plugins, making it highly versatile for client-side scripting.
  • Asynchronous Programming
    JavaScript supports asynchronous programming with features like callbacks, Promises, and async/await, which helps in efficiently handling tasks such as HTTP requests.
  • Rich Ecosystem and Libraries
    The JavaScript ecosystem includes a vast amount of libraries and frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and Node.js, which streamline development processes.
  • Community Support
    JavaScript has a large and active community, providing extensive resources, documentation, and forums for troubleshooting and development advice.
  • Event-Driven
    The language is inherently event-driven, making it suitable for developing interactive web applications that react to user inputs.
  • Full-Stack Development
    With the advent of Node.js, JavaScript can be used for both client-side and server-side development, enabling full-stack development using a single language.

Possible disadvantages of JavaScript

  • Security Issues
    Being an interpreted language that runs in the browser, JavaScript code is visible to the user, making it susceptible to security risks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
  • Browser Compatibility
    While JavaScript itself is widely supported, different browsers may implement JavaScript functions and standards differently, leading to compatibility issues.
  • Performance
    JavaScript is generally slower than compiled languages such as C++ or Java. Heavy computations can lead to performance bottlenecks.
  • Single Inheritance
    JavaScript uses prototypal inheritance instead of classical inheritance, which can be confusing for developers coming from object-oriented programming backgrounds.
  • Dynamic Typing
    JavaScript's dynamic typing can lead to runtime errors that are hard to debug, as variable types are checked at runtime rather than during compilation.
  • Fragmentation
    The ecosystem has many competing libraries, frameworks, and tools, which can make it overwhelming for developers to choose the right technologies for their projects.

Luau videos

+ Add

Waikiki Starlight Luau Review - Hilton Hawaiian Village

More videos:

  • Review - Sheraton Kauai Luau Review - Auli'i
  • Review - Kalamaku luau Review - Kauai Luaus

JavaScript videos

+ Add

Learn JavaScript in 7 minutes | Create Interactive Websites | Code in 5

More videos:

  • Review - Top 10 JavaScript Interview Questions
  • Review - Learn JavaScript in 12 Minutes

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Luau and JavaScript)

Luau

JavaScript

Web App
100 100%
Web App
0% 0
Programming Language
0 0%
Programming Language
100% 100
Green Tech
100 100%
Green Tech
0% 0
OOP
0 0%
OOP
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Luau and JavaScript. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Luau and JavaScript

Luau Reviews

We have no reviews of Luau yet.
Be the first one to post

JavaScript Reviews

Top 10 Rust Alternatives
In simple words, the main goal of JavaScript is to develop web pages and is used for authentication procedures. Some of the pros of using JavaScript as an alternative to Rust are follows.
Source: blog.back4app.com
Top 15 jQuery Alternatives To Know
ExtJS, as the name suggests, stands for Extended JavaScript. As an offering from Sencha, it depends on YahooUserInterface. ExtJS helps in creating data intensified HTML5 apps with JavaScript. It consists of a huge collection of customizable and high-performance widgets that assist in creating cross-platform mobile and web apps, for any type of modernized device.
Source: www.spec-india.com
The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
JavaScript skills are always in high demand – most of the world's top websites and apps rely on JavaScript in one way or another. Plus, JavaScript is a great springboard for learning more complex programming languages.
Source: ict.gov.ge

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Luau seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 34 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Luau mentions (34)

  • A QBasic Text Adventure Still Expanding in 2025
    > How much programming features does Roblox have? You can check out Roblox Studio - https://create.roblox.com/landing And Luau is the scripting language - https://luau.org. - Source: Hacker News / 16 days ago
  • Pluto is a unique dialect of Lua with a focus on general-purpose programming
    Curious how this compares with Luau: https://luau.org. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
    I am building a webserver using Luau[1] and Lune[2], which will be used to host my own website. I haven't been this excited in a long time, when it comes to trying out a new programming language. Luau seems to make Lua _perfect_ (except for the classic 1 based indexing). And with Lune it also includes a very simple way to serve requests, which has always been a headache to do with regular Lua in a cross-platform... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Lune: Standalone Luau Runtime
    Disclaimer: I've contributed to Lune multiple times and have contributed off and on to Luau as well. For those who aren't familiar, Luau is a language based on Lua that is developed and maintained by Roblox. It's entirely open source (you can see the repo here: https://github.com/luau-lang/luau Lune itself is nice and I use it for basically all of the scripting needs I have. Some of the API is limited compared to... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
    It does indeed still work that way! We even still support the old, in-house VM, known as LSO2: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSO We're hard at work adding Luau (https://luau.org) as a supported language for both in-world scripting as well as client/viewer-side scripting. As a handy byproduct of that, LSL will also gain the ability to be compiled to Luau bytecode, allowing us to eventually (someday, at least)... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
View more

JavaScript mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of JavaScript yet. Tracking of JavaScript recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Luau and JavaScript, you can also consider the following products

LOVE 2D - Hi there! LÖVE is an *awesome* framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua.

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

Lua - Powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language

Java - A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible

Capture - A great free screen capture utility that allows you to capture either a window or the desktop and save it to either a file or the clipboard.

Rust - A safe, concurrent, practical language

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