Penlight

The Lua ecosystem is more like the Lisp ecosystem than Python. The language is small enough that there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s just… finished. Hasn’t been updated in 10 years but still works. The LunarModules org tries to gather it up and keep it compatible. For an extended standard lib, the closest thing is probably Penlight. https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight If you want async IO, sockets, etc, check out Luvit. https://luvit.io Lua is really designed as an extension language but it’s such a nifty little language that sometimes you really wish you could use it in place of Python or Perl, which is why LuaJIT is so popular. But LuaJIT is really just one guy’s project. Its metaprogramming features are really nice and let you build some Lisp-style DSLs, and if you want full Lisp syntax you can drop in Fennel. If you’re just w

I see Penlight (which is Python-flavored, but also has some functional programming constructs) https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight , Moses if you like functional programming https://yonaba.github.io/Moses/, likely others, but you're right in that there's no standard, "opinionated" stdlib. No bigint support on LuaJIT etc.

I'm surprised there was no mention of Penlight in that article. Penlight, a supplemental standard library for Lua that is heavily inspired by Python's own standard library, has been around for years now: https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight

For people knowing Lua a bit longer, the "divergence" is nothing surprising, it's an explicit and very long standing design choice by Lua authors. Specifically, that's what allowed them to evolve Lua to the awesome language it is, by making breaking changes when they invented/converged on a notably better way to do something. Personally, I find it more appropriate to look at each new Lua version as a wholly new language, rather than a "new release of the same language". A new language, which "accidentally", as a bow to the user, is very, very similar to the "previous language" from the Lua family (to the point of usually being API and syntax compatible). Actually, the changes between 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 are super small and smooth compared to what was done between e.g. 4.x and 5.x, where language syntax was changed. Between 5.x versions, with so

That's a very useful library, and also great example of how easy it is to hook into C code from Lua. Another one which I prefer personally because it's more comprehensive, is Steve Donovan's Penlight. If you have a background in Python you might enjoy using it: https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight