Looking for a Lua alternative

[Julian Fondren]

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 08:38:02 UTC, solidstate1991 
wrote:
> After losing a battle with trying to get Lua 5.4 working on my 
> own end, with problems I previously solved kept reappearing, 
> and other problems just were unable to fix for no good reason, 
> I've decided to drop it from my own game engine in favor of 
> some replacement.

What problems did you have with Lua 5.4? Building it, linking it, 
driving it from D, Lua as a language? It's very tough 
competition. I got to 'hello world' pretty quickly with 
bindbc-lua,

```d
#! /usr/bin/env dub
/++ dub.sdl:
     dependency "bindbc-lua" version="~>0.6.0"
     versions "LUA_54"
     libs "lua-5.4"
+/
import bindbc.lua;
import std.stdio : writeln;

void main() {
     LuaSupport ret = loadLua();
     assert(ret != luaSupport.noLibrary, "Lua shared library 
failed to load");
     assert(ret != luaSupport.badLibrary, "One or more symbols 
failed to load. Bad version?");
     assert(ret == luaSupport);

     auto L = luaL_newstate();
     assert(L, "failed to open Lua");
     luaL_openlibs(L);
     luaL_loadstring(L, "print 'hello world'");
     lua_call(L, 0, 0);
     lua_close(L);
}
```

and Lua 5.4 has integers:

```
$ lua -e 'print(_VERSION, 9223372036854775807)'
Lua 5.4 9223372036854775807

vs.

$ luajit -e 'print(_VERSION, 9223372036854775807)'
Lua 5.1 9.2233720368548e+18
```