- Lua is fast. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To
claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting
languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm
of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned
benchmark programs, but in real life too. A substantial fraction of large
applications have been written in Lua.
- Lua is portable. Lua is distributed in a small
package that builds out-of-the-box in all platforms that have an
ANSI/ISO C
compiler. Lua runs on all flavors of Unix and Windows, and also on mobile
devices (such as handheld computers and cell phones that use BREW, Symbian,
Pocket PC, etc.) and embedded microprocessors (such as ARM and Rabbit) for
applications like Lego MindStorms.
- Lua is embeddable. Lua is a fast language engine with small footprint that you can embed into
your application. Lua has a simple and well documented
API that allows
strong integration with code written in other languages. It is easy to
extend Lua with libraries written in other languages. It is also easy to
extend programs written in other languages with Lua. Lua has been used to
extend programs written not only in C and C++, but also in Java, C#,
Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, and even in other scripting languages,
such as
Perl and Ruby.
- Lua is simple and powerful. A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms
for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly
in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented
language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and
inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep
the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in
unconventional ways.
- Lua is free. Lua is free software, distributed under a
liberal license (the well-known
MIT
license). It can be used for both academic and commercial purposes at
absolutely no cost. Just download it and use it.
