Luau Reviews and Details

Social recommendations and mentions

• Lute: A Standalone Runtime for Luau

  Lute is a general-purpose, Node.js-style runtime for Luau (https://luau.org/) that just hit 1.0.0. It supports filesystem operations, networking, process management, cryptography, and a proper module system, backed by libraries like libuv, curl, and libsodium. The part we're most excited about: we've exposed APIs for manipulating Luau's syntax tree, so you can write code transformations directly against the... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

• Lily Programming Language

  Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua. There have been some attempts: Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang) Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau) Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra) Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/,... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

• The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

  Take a look at Roblox, their market cap is almost 100B, they developed Luau and their game engine runs on it. - https://luau.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

• 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 / 12 months 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 / about 1 year 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 / over 1 year 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 / over 1 year 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 2 years ago

• Pallene: A statically compiled companion language for Lua

  I love Lua but I also prefer static types, so this looks great. I’ve used Luau[1] in the past which has gradual typing, but that’s less useful unless it’s enforced as a coding standard. [1] https://luau-lang.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago

• You can now write React in Lua

  For anyone interested: Roblox's Luau: https://luau-lang.org/ > Luau is a fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua. > Around 2006, Roblox started using Lua 5.1 as a scripting language for games. Over the years the runtime had to be tweaked to provide a safe, secure sandboxed environment; we gradually started accumulating small library changes and tweaks. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago

• Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect

  Alternatively, Luau is a well-supported Lua variant with type checking and performance improvements, aimed more towards being a sandboxed embedded scripting environment. https://luau-lang.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language

  If you need Lua but also type-safety, how about Luau [1] then? [1] https://luau-lang.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Lua Criticism Is Unwarranted

  I had the pleasure of working with Lua 5.1 back in the late noughties. For me it's replaced Tcl whenever I want something I can configure above a C library. At the time I used it I found it quite nice but I'll also not forget the hours I wasted tracking down nil table corruptions which could have easily been caught by a type checker. I had some hope that Luau https://luau-lang.org or Teal - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago

• Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

  Looking at other replies here, I can see I wasn't the only one who didn't realize there is Lua and Luau. Luau is an extension of Lua: https://luau-lang.org/ > Luau is syntactically backwards-compatible with Lua 5.1 (code that is valid Lua 5.1 is also valid Luau); however, we have extended the language with a set of syntactical features that make the language more familiar and ergonomic. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago

• The Warframe Lexicon for Updates

  On a side note, I've heard that they recently switched from Lua to Roblox's own fork of Lua, Luau. Source: over 3 years ago

• Scripting Resources MegaThread

  Https://luau-lang.org/ - some documentation, and examples Https://create.roblox.com/docs - documentation, tutorials, and examples Https://www.youtube.com/user/AlvinBLOX - tutorials Https://www.youtube.com/@TheDevKing/videos - tutorials Https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/ - not specific to Roblox, but Lua reference manual Https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-lua - Lua on Codecademy. Source: over 3 years ago

• Does a for loop need an increment value?

  The beauty of Roblox's Luau is that you don't need to type pairs(), which is required by the OG Lua 5. So, Local waypoints = workspace.Waypoints For _, I in waypoints:GetChildren() do -- Do something here with each waypoint End. Source: over 3 years ago

• Lua++: a new, type-based alternative for Lua.

  On a somewhat unrelated note: If my memory serves me correct, I think that Luau (roblox's own version of Lua) also has some of the features you have here, such as a type system. (https://luau-lang.org/). Source: over 3 years ago

• Using Lua with C++

  For those interested in using Lua or a similar syntax I collected a list of typed Lua-related projects: - https://luau-lang.org (interpreted / sandboxed, from Roblox). - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• Is it possible to make an OS in Lua?

  You could probably write a kernel in Nelua or Luau, though I don't know of any efforts to do so. Source: over 3 years ago

• Take More Screenshots

  When I started making a game [0] last year, first thing I did was write a little Unity script that takes a screenshot of the opening scene, counts current lines of code using CLOC [1] (for fun, not as a true measure of anything), and occasionally renders it all out to an image file. With that I'm able to create some pretty fun time lapses of progress. I've been doing this at an arbitrary milestone, whenever my... - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago