Lua Programming Language

Hello World !!

Lua is a fast programming language that is easy to learn and use. Lua is being used in embedded applications, Games, Network application, Desktop and modern Apps. It's MIT license and Open Source.

Lua as a scripting language supports procedural, functional, object oriented, and data-driven programming. It's being used in top product based companies.

List of software and application where Lua is used

These days Software and Games are built using multiple programming languages, Technologies - it's not just one language. The following is a list where Lua is part of their product tech stack.

Famous Game and Engine:

1. Unreal Engine Game action Scripting ( Used in Games like PubG, Fortnite )
2. Angry Bird Game
3. Unity Engine ( Famous for its Android/iOS Mobile Games )
4. FryCry Game ( Best Graphics game during 2004 ~ 2009 )
5. World of Warcraft ( WoW is a massively multiplayer role-playing game )
6. Microsoft Minecraft
7. Sony PSP console
8. Nintendo console

Famous Software:

1. Adobe Light House ( Photo Editing software )
2. Mysql Database Proxy
3. Redis Database
4. Kong API Gateway ( API gateway used these days for micro-services )
5. istio Service Mesh ( Famous Service mesh used in micro-services )
6. Nginx Server Scripting ( Reverse Proxy server and other use-cases )

Famous Network Analysis tool and Others

1. Nmap (Network Scanner)
2. Wireshark (Packet Analyzer)
3. Black Shark (PC flight simulator of the Russian Ka-50 attack helicopter )

Let's learn Lua Language

In the following code snippet, we will understand how to declare simple variable, then will declare an array ( Table data structure ) using for loop. At last we will see if/else statement.

Eco-System of Lua

Every Open Source programming language need community support and backed by top companies.

As Developer we need support in Editor like VSCode, Sublime and a Package Manager.

Lua is well supported in Microsoft VSCode IDE and we have LuaRocks as Package manager for Lua.

Also community support is increasing on Github.

Why one more programming language ?

Lua as a language easily fits into other languages like C, C++ and C#. So it makes life easy to allow users/customer to add extra feature using easy to learn language like LUA.

Portable: Lua is written in ANSI C and has a small footprint, making it easy to port to different platforms.

Creator of Pubg Game, Tencent investing on Lua for their Game development support in Unity Engine.

xLua Project created by Tencent https://github.com/Tencent/xLua/blob/master/README_EN.md

Core Games, which is a Game Desinging platform is build on top of Unreal Engine is fully supporting Lua as Language for Game Development.

https://www.coregames.com/

How to run Lua code inside C++

Incase you are interested, you can explore code of Nmap tool which is famous in Linux.

https://github.com/nmap/nmap

My Experience with Lua

Recently i have written Lua script to develop custom plugin for Kong API Gateway. It was easy and fun. Also i was exploring area where i can extend Nginx core features.

In the next article we talk more about Lua on production.

Thanks for reading.