Compiled programming languages and scripting languages each have unique advantages, but what if you could use both to create rich applications? Lua is an embeddable scripting language that is small, fast, and very powerful. Before you create yet another configuration file or resource format (and yet another parser to accompany it), try Lua.
Compiled programming languages and scripting languages each have unique advantages, but what if you could use both to create rich applications? Lua is an embeddable scripting language that is small, fast, and very powerful. Before you create yet another configuration file or resource format (and yet another parser to accompany it), try Lua.
While interpreted programming languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby are increasingly favored for Web applications and have long been preferred for automating system administration tasks, compiled programming languages such as C and C++ are still necessary. The performance of compiled programming languages remains unmatched (exceeded only by the performance of hand-tuned assembly), and certain software — including operating systems and device drivers — can only be implemented efficiently using compiled code. Indeed, whenever software and hardware need to mesh seamlessly, programmers instinctively reach for a C compiler: C is primitive enough to get “close to the bare metal” — that is, to capture the idiosyncracies of a piece of hardware — yet expressive enough to offer some high-level programming constructs, such as structures, loops, named variables, and scope.
However, scripting languages have distinct advantages, too. For example, after a language’s interpreter is successfully ported to a platform, the vast majority of scripts written in that language run on the new platform unchanged, free of dependencies such as system-specific function libraries. (Think of the many DLLs of the Windows operating system or the many libc’s of Unix and Linux.) Additionally, scripting languages typically offer higher-level programming…
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