Re: Does Lua need a JIT?

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2017-03-01 11:26 GMT+02:00 Luke Gorrie <luke@snabb.co>:

> I am a little curious about whether Lua aspires to be a single
> implementation language or a Lisp-like family of languages or
> whether it's meaningless to anthropomorphize it like that.

The designers of Lua think of it as a C library, of which the
loading and execution of code written in the Lua scripting
language forms a large part. They offer the Lua interpreter
and the Lua-to-bytecode compiler as sample applications.

The users of Lua embed it, generalize it, write applications
in it, in the process changing the implementation as well
as the language. This is possible because of the very generous
MIT-like license under which Lua is published.

I don't think Lua herself has any aspirations. Last time I asked
her about it, she said: "🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑".