It is designed to be backward compatible with Lua 5.1, as well as incorporating some features from future Lua releases, but also expands the feature set (most notably with type annotations). Luau is largely implemented from scratch, with the language runtime being a very heavily modified version of Lua 5.1 runtime, with a completely rewritten interpreter and other performance innovations. The runtime mostly preserves Lua 5.1 API, so existing bindings should be more or less compatible with a few caveats. Luau is used by Roblox game developers to write game code, as well as by Roblox engineers to implement large parts of the user-facing application code as well as portions of the editor (Roblox Studio) as plugins. Roblox chose to open-source Luau to foster collaboration within the Roblox community as well as to allow other companies and communities to benefit from the ongoing language and runtime innovation. As a consequence, Luau is now also used by games like Alan Wake 2 and Warframe.
Features
- Luau is an embeddable language, but it also comes with two command-line tools by default, luau and luau-analyze
- Documentation available
- luau is a command-line REPL and can also run input files
- Examples available
- luau-analyze is a command-line type checker and linter; given a set of input files, it produces errors/warnings according to the file configuration
- On all platforms, you can use CMake to run
- Luau has an internal test suite
Project Samples
