Lua

Lua is an excellent programming language built to extend various applications. It is also commonly used as a general-purpose standalone language. One of the most remarkable aspects of Lua is that it is entirely free software. It combines straightforward procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Moreover, it is dynamically typed, interpreted from bytecodes, and has automatic memory management with garbage collection. All these attributes make Lua perfect for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

In terms of design, Lua's primary goal is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features instead of offering a host of features directly in the language. For example, although it is not purely object-oriented, Lua provides meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. This brings an economy of concepts, keeping the language small while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways. Extensible semantics is, therefore, a distinguishing feature of Lua.

As an embeddable language engine, Lua's API enables applications to exchange data with Lua programs and extend Lua using C functions. This makes Lua an excellent framework for building domain-specific languages. What's more, Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The result is a fast language engine with a small footprint, making it ideal for embedded systems too.

Lua is designed and implemented by a team at Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil). Tecgraf is a laboratory of the Department of Computer Science. In summary, Lua is an outstanding programming language, characterized by its simplicity, efficiency, portability, and low embedding cost. It is free, powerful and it brings an economy of concepts. With all these features, Lua is worth considering for every developer seeking a high-performance programming language for their project.