Lua is faster than Fortran???

[Paul Rubin]

"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy at druid.net> writes:
>> I find LUA quite interesting: instead of providing a language simple
>> to develop in, it focuses heavily on implementation simplicity. Maybe
>> that's the reason why it could be done at all by a single person.
>
> Is that really true about LUA?  I haven't looked that closely at it but
> that paragraph probably turned off most people on this list to LUA.

I would say Lua focuses on implementation compactness; it's intended as
an embedded scripting interpreter.  It's easy to sandbox and uses just
50k or so of memory.  It's running in a lot of mobile phones, cameras,
etc.  The language itself is nowhere near as featureful as Python and I
wouldn't want to use it for large scale development, but it appears
pretty good for what it was intended for.

Interestingly, it doesn't have lists or arrays.  Its only container
structure is comparable to a Python dictionary.  Arrays are just the
special case of dictionaries indexed by numbers.  There is a little bit
of syntax sugar to help with that, but it's just the dict structure
underneath.

I wouldn't say it was all done by one person though, and in particular
I think LuaJIT was done by a different group than the main Lua developers.