Features of Lua

Lua is a simple extensible and portable programming language, it can be used for creating simple as well as dynamic applications with minimal memory footprint. We will look into the major features of Lua as a programming language.

Cross-platform

Lua is cross-platform because its interpreter of compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C. So, Lua has a relatively simple C API that can be embedded into applications. So this feature of Lua allows to run it virtually anywhere making it truly a cross-platform language.

Lightweight

Lua has an extremely simple and thorough source code, making it lightweight and efficient in both performance and robustness. This feature of Lua makes it viable for easily integrating into multiple platforms and has a wide range of applications ranging from embedded applications to game engines.

Dynamic Data types

Since lua is a dynamically typed language like python, javascript, ruby, etc the variable doesn’t have types so to speak but the literal values stored inside of that variable. This makes it extremely easy for rapid prototyping of applications and creating high-level applications without explicit control over memory and the types. 

Efficiency

Lua is considered to be one of the fastest languages among dynamically typed programming languages. The reasons are the mentioned points the light-weightiness of runtime and writing speed. The speed can be even further increased by using the Just In Time compiler for Lua and making efficient use of memory and space. Not only it is faster in terms of runtime speed but it is quite easier to write code in Lua.

Lua is a programming language that is used for scripting, embedded applications, as well as for quite other technologies including plugins and text editors. Lua is a lightweight and open-source programming language it has been used in game development engines like Love 2D cocos2D,  text editors like Neovim, desktop applications like MySQL workbench, WireShark, etc. It is quite easy to learn and start with Lua, so in this article, we will install Lua on a Linux machine.