Why choose Lua?

 

 

Why choose Lua?
Lua is a proven, robust language
Lua has been used in many industrial applications (e.g., Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom)
with an emphasis on embedded systems (e.g., the Ginga middleware for digital TV in Brazil) and games (e.g., World of Warcraft and Angry Birds).
Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games.

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.

Lua is portable
Lua is distributed in a small package and builds out-of-the-box in all platforms that have a standard C compiler.
Lua runs on all flavors of Unix and Windows, on mobile devices (running Android, iOS, BREW, Symbian, Windows Phone).
on embedded microprocessors (such as ARM and Rabbit, for applications like Lego MindStorms), on IBM mainframes, etc.

Lua is embeddable
Lua is a fast language engine with small footprint that you can embed easily 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, Erlang, and even in other scripting languages, such as Perl and Ruby.

Lua is powerful (but simple)
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 small
The source contains around 23000 lines of C.

Lua is free
Lua is free open-source software

Game Developer magazine's 2011 Front Line Award winners
Programming tool
Lua
Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes
Lua has become an extremely popular programming language, so much so that it's achieved a critical mass of developers in the game industry, meaning Lua skills are transferable from company to company.
That's partly due to its speed and the ease with which developers can embed Lua into a game engine.
Lua is also highly extensible -- it's simple to expand its functionality with libraries either written in Lua, or as extensions in other languages.
And it's relatively small and simple, both in terms of the source files, and the resultant code and run-time memory usage