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luau-lang
luau
C++2021–2026
luau-lang / luau

luau

A small, fast, and embeddable programming language based on Lua with a gradual type system.

Languages & Compilers
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16Distinct people
16Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A small, fast, and embeddable programming language based on Lua with a gradual type system.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year16 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-11-03 18:25:57 UTC to 2026-02-05 15:32:39 UTC.

012342021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

16 sources
publicdebates·Feb 5, 2026
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/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl) The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.
In Lily Programming Language
slippy·May 22, 2025
Have you tried Luau - Roblox's open source compiled Lua with Types? Someone made a debugger for it that plugs into Visual Studio Code. https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/ https://github.com/sssooonnnggg/luau-debugger I'm working on an engine based in C++, Luau, and OpenGL - started almost 2 months ago. I aim for it to me MIT license open source, but it's too early for sharing. When it is, I do plan to post a show HN with the Github link.
In Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Dekkonot·May 21, 2025
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) and it's diverged a fair bit from Lua at this point. Most notably, it's quite a bit faster than the PUC-Rio distribution of Lua, has native vector support, and has a type checker. It's not as fast as LuaJIT, but it's about as fast as you can expect for a non-JITed language and it has support for AoT compiling to native instructions on x86 and aarch64, so it can be basically as fast as LuaJIT for some tasks. It's worth reading the website: https://luau.org/ Lune itself is nice and I use it for basically all of the scripting needs I have. Some of th
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e API is limited compared to what you'd get in other runtimes (the obvious example is hashing, where it's just "string in, string out" instead of a stream that you can feed into and then finalize) but the logic is essentially that APIs should be "good enough" for the average user, not perfect. I think that's fine, but I'm also the one that wrote the hashing API so take it with a grain of salt. :-)
In Lune: Standalone Luau Runtime
forrestthewoods·Dec 26, 2024
> but considering how widely Lua is used for game logic in high performance video games clearly those concerns can be addressed. It’s ok, but should be much better. Once upon a time Supreme Commander used Lua. Perf on consoles for SupCom2 was catastrophically bad. We switched to Kore which was effectively Lua but way faster (10x?). Kore was bought by Havok and rebranded into Havok Script. Havok got bought by Microsoft. I’m honestly not even sure if you can still buy it today. It’s not listed on their website. These days I think you’d use Luau? I’m not sure. https://github.com/luau-lang/luau
In Lua is so underrated
HaroldCindy·Jun 30, 2024
>> the VM assumes that the bytecode was generated by the Luau compiler (which never produces invalid/unsafe bytecode) Yep, to that end they also have a basic bytecode verifier (only used in debug mode / when asserts are enabled) that validates the compiler only outputs valid bytecode, and I believe they continuously fuzz the compiler to make sure those asserts can't be triggered. See https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/blob/0d2688844ab285af1ef52... It's fairly robust (and Luau bytecode isn't _that_ complex,) but they made the right decision disallowing direct bytecode execution.
In Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws
fwsgonzo·Jan 11, 2024
http://lua-users.org/wiki/SandBoxes There is a lot of information there, but it doesn't seem to be able to handle resource exhaustion, execution time limits or even give any guarantees. It does indicate that it's possible to use as a sandbox, and has a decent example of the most restrictive setup. But I would for example compare it with Luau's SECURITY.md. From https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/blob/master/SECURITY.md: > Luau provides a safe sandbox that scripts can not escape from, short of vulnerabilities in custom C functions exposed by the host. This includes the virtual machine and builtin libraries. Notably this currently does not include the work-in-progress native code generation facilities. > Any source code can not result in memory safety errors or crashes during its compilation or execution. Violations of memory safety are cons
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idered vulnerabilities. > Note that Luau does not provide termination guarantees - some code may exhaust CPU or RAM resources on the system during compilation or execution. So, even luau will have trouble with untrusted code, but it does give certain guarantees, and writes specifically about what is not covered. I think that's fair. And then libriscv. From https://github.com/fwsGonzo/libriscv/blob/master/SECURITY.md: > libriscv provides a safe sandbox that guests can not escape from, short of vulnerabilities in custom system calls installed by the host. This includes the virtual machine and the native helper libraries. Do not use binary translation in production at this time. Do not use linux filesystem or socket system calls in production at this time. > libriscv provides termination guarantees and default resource limits - code should not be able to exhaust CPU or RAM resources on the system during initialization or execution. If blocking calls are used during system calls, use socket timeouts or timers + signals to cancel. So, it is possible to provide limits while still running fast. I imagine many WebAssembly emulators can give the same guarantees.
In Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically (2023)
cloudmike·Oct 21, 2023
I use Luau in my games and tools [1], and I recommend it. While I can't speak to transitioning to it from Lua, since I didn't do that, I can say that it's fast, stable, sandboxing just works (important for your use case), and it's very well supported and regularly updated. For context, I first started using Luau as an experimental hack by integrating it with Unity. I mostly just wanted fast and simple hot reloading. I found myself writing more and more of it, and now I'm writing most of my code in it. VS Code support is pretty good via the luau-lsp language server [2]. Type support for certain code patterns isn't great yet, but there are RFCs to improve this. They're also quietly working on native code gen and JIT support, e.g. this PR from a few hours ago [3]. Overall, recommended! You're not crazy. [1] https://twitter.com/kineticpoet [2
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] https://github.com/JohnnyMorganz/luau-lsp [3] https://github.com/Roblox/luau/pull/1076
In Ask HN: Looking for platforms, other than Roblox, that have adopted Luau

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