Lua is designed to be a lightweight embeddable scripting language. It is used for all sorts of applications, from games to web applications and image processing. See the about page for a detailed description of Lua and some reasons why you should choose Lua. See what Lua programs look and feel like in the live demo. Learning

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics.

Lua 5.3 Reference Manual The reference manual is the official definition of the Lua language. For a complete introduction to Lua programming, see the book Programming in Lua.

Lua is implemented in pure ANSI C and compiles unmodified in all platforms that have an ANSI C compiler. Lua also compiles cleanly as C++. Lua is very easy to build and install. There are detailed instructions in the package but here is a simple terminal session that downloads the current release of Lua and builds it in Linux:

If you are using the stand-alone Lua interpreter, all you have to do to run your first program is to call the interpreter (usually named lua) with the name of the text file that contains your program.

Mar 26, 2025 · Lua 5.0 was released on 11 Apr 2003. Its main new features were collaborative multithreading via Lua coroutines, full lexical scoping instead of upvalues, and metatables instead of tags and tag methods. Lua 5.0 also introduced booleans, proper tail calls, and weak tables.

Apr 10, 2024 · The official definition of the Lua language is its reference manual, which describes the syntax and the semantics of Lua, the standard libraries, and the C API. For a detailed introduction to the practice of Lua programming, see the book Programming in Lua , …

Lua 5.4.7 released Lua Programming Gems freely available Lua Workshop 2023 held in Rio de Janeiro Building a Programming Language course Mailing list moved

Lua compares strings in alphabetical order, which follows the locale set for Lua. For instance, with the European Latin-1 locale, we have "acai" < "açaí" < "acorde" . Other types can be compared only for equality (and inequality).

The types returned by lua_type are coded by the following constants defined in lua.h: LUA_TNIL, LUA_TNUMBER, LUA_TBOOLEAN, LUA_TSTRING, LUA_TTABLE, LUA_TFUNCTION, LUA_TUSERDATA, LUA_TTHREAD, and LUA_TLIGHTUSERDATA.