wasm_lua

Can confirm that Lua does run in WASM in the browser: https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if Lua had zero based indices and saw a bit broader adoption. It's such an easy language to embed/extends although QuickJS looks like it's going to give it a run for the money in the long term given the similar goals on ease of embedding. I wonder if anyone has compiled QuickJS to WASM and run it in the browser.

I mean Lua[1] exists, predates Javascript[2], is incredibly fast[3] and can be easily embedded[4]. I've personally shipped production game titles where the whole game state + logic was inside a 400kb block on a PSP where you only had 8MB of system ram, and this was before LuaJIT. Sadly, developer familiarity and ecosystem/mindshare sometimes dominate technical constraints, at least that's how we ended up with Javascript everywhere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript [3] https://luajit.org/ [4] https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

I think the large difference here is that the VM for WASM is much thinner. Java was not then and still isn't today the fastest of languages. I think WASM's model of being a lower level VM is going to produce fantastic results. Heck I "ported" Lua to WASM[1] and it was pretty snappy compared to what I was expecting. [1] https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

Sounds like you're yearning for WebAssembly. With WebAssembly you can write your solution in any language it just needs to be compiled to WebAssembly. Every major browser is backing WebAssembly. As a result (and for example) Microsoft is making it possible to write front-end code in C# which is compiled with a small .NET runtime into the browser with WebAssembly. In theory efforts could be (and likely have been) made to compile Lua to WebAssembly. Quick search reveals at least two results: https://scriptinghelpers.org/lua https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

> We're still a long ways off from garbage-collected languages inside wasm. I'm not sure what you mean by that. Is there some limitation inherent to WebAssembly that makes implementing garbage collection particularly difficult? For what it's worth, here's Lua (which implements a garbage collector in its runtime) in WebAssembly: https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

No need to do that, you can use wasm to build lua[1], although the API definitely needs some clean up. This looks much nicer from a JS integration perspective. [1] https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

Well anything that lets me run Lua in the browser[1] is cool by me ;). But yeah, interop is something that you can't just hand-wave away. It needs to be done carefully and with the right semantics and performance. That said I think we well get there and for a certain limited use cases it's already there. [1] https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

Looks like a great guide to get started with coding with Minecraft. There have been some efforts over the years, but this looks really complete. One obstacle for schools to get started with this however, is buying all the Minecraft licenses. To this end, I've been toying around a bit with an open source Minecraft clone called Minetest lately [1][2]. It's surprisingly complete, and could also have great uses in (programming) education. It has a C++ core based on the Irrlicht 3D engine, but many of the game mechanics are implemented in Lua. Modifications like the examples in Teachcraft can also be built in Lua. For example, this [3] is a mod to spread flowers and mushrooms around the map. The Lua language isn't used much currently in the education environment, which is mostly focused around Scratch, Python and sometimes Javascript. Then aga

There is also one in WebAssembly: https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua