Luau

What is Luau?

Luau is a fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua. It is designed to be backwards 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 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 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. Luau aggregates brands like Nike, Ulta, Gymshark and Allbirds and covers discovery, purchase and tracking, with the best part being that it shows the environmental impact of what it sells

Highlights

• Fast, small, and safe scripting language
• Gradual typing and backwards compatibility with Lua 5.1
• Used by Roblox game developers and engineers to write game code and application code
• Open-sourced to foster collaboration and allow other communities to benefit
• Aggregates brands and covers discovery, purchase, and tracking with environmental impact information