luwa

Your complaints are mostly addressed in Lua 5.3 (64 bit integers, utf8 in stdlib, bitwise ops) & many would suggest you use LPeg if you're itching for non trivial string manipulation Also the documentation provided by lua.org is quite accessible: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3 What I'd really like is stdlib to provide a Buffer type, as opposed to having to use a table of integers which then gets pushed into a string with chunked calls to string.char(table.unpack(buf, n, n+4096)) Example of what I'm complaining about: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/make.lua#L758 So all said I don't disagree with you: Lua can fall short, it doesn't have the community other languages have built up, & the community it has is rather fractured. Like LuaJIT making 5.2 what most call Lua, but also that being an extension language it's hard to upgr

> Resulting code for a gc looks like this: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/gc.lua Nice! That's a compact gc, perfect for browsers.

It's not a JavaScript imitation. This is a JavaScript-like syntax for writing WebAssembly. Other than that, (excepting the closure helper) it's 1-to-1 WebAssembly. Not everyone enjoys writing verbose S-Expressions [1], even if it makes for a good canonical format. If you despise JavaScript so much that you can't bear the thought of something that vaguely looks like JavaScript, then don't worry there are other "skins" for writing WebAssembly [2-4] and it should not be too hard to write your own. Finally, nobody owns WebAssembly. It's for clever people like yourself just as much as it is for dirty JavaScript programmers like me. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Text_fo... [2] https://github.com/tmcw/wah [3] https://github.com/serprex/luwa [4] https://medium.com/cirru-project/webassembly-s-expression-an...

I've been going with Lua for writing raw webassembly Assembler setup: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/make.lua Resulting code for a gc looks like this: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/gc.lua & it leaves the full Lua language at my disposal for metaproramming. At the end of a day a human usable assembler needs to be a macro assembler It'd be neat to have a JS macroassembler, could then have the host browser runtime compile wasm modules dynamically

It's not a binary encoded AST anymore, it's pretty much a stack machine (with constraints like .NET which allow for easy conversion to SSA) Example: A Lua lexer, https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/f048aa2f67dfae00740d556...