LuaJIT 3.0 proposed syntax extensions

pansa2

So is LuaJIT resuming active development after a decade or so of only maintenance? Great! A lot of these changes make sense (although some of them are a bit too TIMTOWTDI for my taste) - but perhaps LuaJIT 3 would benefit from a change of name as well? Certainly with all these changes, it would be more like a separate language than merely a JIT-compiled version of Lua.

ricardobeat

I see JavaScript. Some of these really look like QoL improvements. I'm not convinced ternary statements are an ergonomic improvement in particular. The examples given don't make a compelling case, 'visually tidy' is not the same as readable.

matheusmoreira

Looks like LuaJIT is really going to fork away from Lua this time. After these changes, it won't be a compatible Lua 5.1 implementation anymore, it will be a new language. So shouldn't it have a new name?

3eb7988a1663

Never will I understand ternary operators. As soon as you introduce it, some chuckle heads want to use them everywhere. Worse if the syntax allows nested ternarys. I guess it keeps the language open for code golfing, but it otherwise seems like redundant syntax that at best saves a few characters.

linzhangrun

I thought luajit had completely stopped feature updates

bawolff

+= and ..= are things i find i'm constantly missing in lua. Personally im a fan of introducing ternaranary operator in lua. Everyone uses `x and y or z` as a ternanary which i find way more confusing than ?:

le-mark

I’m confused I thought Mike Pall left luajit and Laurence Tratt took over as maintainer?

Heliodex

A comment < https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/1475#issuecomment-47... > has already been made on the issue regarding the ternary operator, recommending `if x then y else z` over `x ? y : z`. This is exactly how it's done with if-then-else expressions in Luau < https://luau.org/syntax/#if-then-else-expressions >, another language compatible with Lua, and makes it a ton easier to nest (especially with elseif) and I believe still easier to read than `y if x else z`.

larrry

I would love to see all of these come to LuaJIT (and love2d to support the new version too). It’s nice that Lua is simple, the syntax changes should hopefully make Lua code even simpler to read too

sourcegrift

What are some pragmatic embedded scripting languages of choice these days if one has to consider: 1) Ease of learning, ideally minimal deviant behaviour (eg i consider lua tables to be a new concept in itself) 2) Reasonably fast. Not as much as lua jit but even half would be good enough 3) Mature 4) Has Rust bindings

JSR_FDED

Cool to see this - ergonomic syntax will make it easier to recommend Lua. Hope the PUC team aligns with this. Also, I love this kind of pragmatism: > Exponentiation assignment a ^= b has been deliberately omitted to avoid a predictable pitfall: this is how xor assignment is written in most other computer languages. Also, a syntax for exponentiation assignment is rarely asked for. A ‘defer’ for closing files or deleting temp files at the end of a script will make life more enjoyable.

kibwen

Please don't, inscrutable bitwise operators are an accident of the past even in systems languages, let alone in a scripting language. I'm not against infix operators for bitwise operations, just please spell them out with keywords rather than giving them sigils. Likewise, going from `and` and `or` to `&&` and `||` would be a dispiriting regression. This is something that Zig got right.

JSR_FDED

What’s the Lua/LuaJIT story these days for bundling up all the scripts of an application into a single file? Is there a way to do the super convenient go-like thing?

ianm218

Tangently related but I’ve been deep in Lua recently working on a rust implementation that supports Lua 5.1-5.5 in one Rust Binary https://github.com/ianm199/omnilua . My ultimate goal was to support LuaJIT in Rust as well but this does not make it easier.

omoikane

Lua 5.3 (2015-01-12) added the bitwise operators: https://www.lua.org/versions.html#5.3 https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.4.2 Looks like LuaJIT is catching up, but calling these "syntax extensions" is confusing. Is the intent to hold LuaJIT fixed against some earlier Lua version (I guess 5.1) and adopt newer syntax piecemeal? I welcome the compound assignment operators. Playdate's version of Lua also has that extension.

shevy-java

Lua has a lot of useless syntax. For instance, the "then". I have been using ruby and python for many years. Lua is living in the old age here. That's just one example of so many more. I get that lua occupies a useful niche with its focus on embedded systems, but lua is not really a well-designed language in general. JavaScript has a similar problem.

Ardren

> For compatibility with other computer languages, the following classic Lua operators can be written in a more customary syntax: Why though? What does changing `and` to `&&` actually achieve? Were people confused? Changing the syntax seems very surface level. It's not actually fixing any problems, just making Lua no longer look like Lua. It's not going to help anyone write/learn Lua. It will make everything more complicated as there are now two ways to do everything. This feels like adding braces to Python because you don't like indenting your code.

pseudony

Seems like a bad idea to actively diverge from Lua, hostile even, especially without at least a clear change of name.

flumpcakes

Is LuaJIT still based on Lua5.1? I wonder why they haven't followed the language spec up to Lua5.5.

spankalee

They shouldn't add the ternary operator, it keeps `?` from being usable on it's own for safe navigation and requires the ugly `?.` operator, like `a?.[b]` or `f?.()` instead of `a?[b]` or `f?()`.