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Welcome to Lua 5.4

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Development

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language developed by a team at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua is free software used in many products and projects around the world.

Lua's official web site provides complete information about Lua, including an executive summary and updated documentation, especially the reference manual, which may differ slightly from the local copy distributed in this package.

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Also: Lua 5.4 Released With New Garbage Collection Mode, Warning System

What's new in Lua 5.4

  • What's new in Lua 5.4

    Lua version 5.4 was released at the end of June; it is the fifteenth major version of the lightweight scripting language since its creation in 1993. New in 5.4 is a generational mode for the garbage collector, which performs better for programs with lots of short-lived allocations. The language now supports "attributes" on local variables, allowing developers to mark variables as constant (const) or resources as closeable (close). There were also significant performance improvements over 5.3 along with a host of minor changes.

    Lua is a programming language optimized for embedding inside other applications, with notable users such as Redis and Adobe Lightroom. It has been used as a scripting language for many computer games, including big names such as World of Warcraft and Angry Birds; Lua was the most-used scripting language in a 2009 survey of the game industry. Part of the reason Lua is good for embedding is because it is small: in these days of multi-megabyte downloads for even the simplest applications, the entire Lua 5.4 distribution (source plus docs) is a 349KB archive. To build a Lua interpreter with the default configuration, a developer can type make and wait about five seconds for compilation — the result is a self-contained 200-300KB binary.

    Major versions of Lua are released every few years, not on any particular release cycle. The previous major version, 5.3, was released over five years ago, in January 2015, with the addition of a separate integer type (previously Lua used only floating-point numbers), bitwise operators, a basic UTF-8 library, and many minor features.

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