Re: Wikipedia Chooses Lua As Its New Template Language

[Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@...>]

Three things: Lua never looked back too much. This was also a good
recipie to create a clean language, which releases did not break
something? I think thats the options you get in language development,
either you are always fully backward compatible like many others are,
and after a while you just pile the dirt and binary gets larger and
slower due to all compatibility checking or you get complaints about
breaking. Compared to 4.0 to 5.0 breaking, current changes are
negligible.

About the LuaJIT vs Lua5.2. It depends on how much CPU vs. IO impact
you have. I suppose you might tend to the later where it JIT doesn't
matter much, since the time gets burned in IO. Tim Caswell reported
with his development of Luvit (https://github.com/luvit/luvit Like
Node.JS just in Lua) that in most examples he did, he meassured twice
as fast than Javascript due to smaller C barrier, but hardly any
difference between vanilla Lua and LuaJIT.

Also this is just prediction, but you don't need to worry about 5.3.
Statistically it won't come anytime soon. Time between Lua releases
seem to follow an exponential growth. This is what I did a while back:
http://img862.imageshack.us/img862/674/luaprediction.png
If the trend does not get a sudden break, expect 5.3 (or 6.0) around
22th Oct 2021.