Why Lua? Getting Started

Lua is a small, fast, embeddable scripting language. You'll rarely run a "Lua application" on its own, instead, Lua gets embedded inside something bigger: game engines (Roblox, Love2D, World of Warcraft addons), Neovim configuration, and even network appliances.

Why it's popular for embedding

• Tiny and fast, the reference interpreter is a few hundred KB and famously quick for a dynamic language.
• Simple to embed, a C program can create a Lua interpreter, hand it data, and call Lua functions in only a few lines.
• Small core language, few keywords, one data structure (the table) that does almost everything.

Your first script

print("Hello from Lua!")

local name = "Kodstigen"
print("Welcome to " .. name)

Run it with:

lua hello.lua

• print writes a line to standard output.
• local declares a variable scoped to the current block, without it, a variable is global by default, almost always a mistake.
• .. is the string concatenation operator (Lua does not overload + for strings the way JavaScript does).