lua.js

Thats actually difficult, eg Lua has coroutines, a function can be a hash table key and other incompatibilities. There are some but they are fairly limited by this. This is the main implementation https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js

Would be interesting to compare performance to the other ways of getting Lua to run in the browser, which include writing a Lua bytecode interpreter in JS, converting Lua to JS, and code generation from bytecode. https://github.com/creationix/brozula https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js (and others, I had a list somewhere) Quite a few companies are using Lua->JS as a way of doing write once run cross platform games eg we had this talk at London Lua http://www.londonlua.org/luajavascript/index.html

I rewrote the whole runtime in CoffeeScript. I'm basically using the exact same C# data files, I simply wrote the equivalent of the .NET BinaryReader in JS (using the recent ArrayBufferView WebGL typed array thing) to read back my binary project & asset files. I then use Lua.js (https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js/) to convert the Lua scripts into JS at load time and mrdoob's Three.js (threejs.org) to render it all.

Lua's great. I recently used it to rewrite a small audio effect framework[1] based on an older project of mine in C[2]. To my astonishment, without any optimization efforts on my part, the LuaJIT version of one effect ran faster than the C version, while another more complicated effect (a filter) only took 2.01x as much time as C. And this was with simple, clean, mostly declarative code (read it on GitHub and see what you think). One of the goals of this project was to compile effects code to JavaScript with Lua.js[3] and produce a demo that ran in the browser. There, unfortunately, I ran into a showstopper with a Lua.js bug[4] that breaks my approach to creating modules. Unlike LuaJIT and regular Lua, Lua.js is an experimental project and far less mature - though totally awesome. I might make another attempt to fix the problem myself at

Well, you can write client-side web apps in Lua: https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js Unfortunately, there is a bug in Lua.js and it doesn't support the preferred method of creating modules[1]. For this reason, I've yet to get a substantial size app written. I'd still like to go back and fix this myself eventually, but I was sinking a lot of time into trying to get it to work. [1] https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js/issues/13#issuecomment-...