The evolution of Lua

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo | Ierusalimschy, Roberto | Celes, Waldemar

Keywords:

Lua is a scripting language born in 1993 at PUC-Rio in Brazil. Since then, Lua has evolved to become one of the leading scripting languages in the world. Lua is widely used for game development and for many other industrial tasks, such as robotics, literate programming, distributed business applications, image processing, extensible text editors, Ethernet switches, bioinformatics, finite-element packages~\cite{lua-uses}. Lua has gone far beyond our most optimistic expectations. Lua is the only language developed outside the industrialized world to have achieved global relevance. In this paper, we report on the birth and evolution of Lua. We discuss how the language moved from its simple origins to a powerful (but still simple) language that now supports extensible semantics, anonymous functions, full lexical closures, proper tail recursion, and coroutines.

Anexos:

• hopl.pdf