Lua vs F#

One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game.

Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages.

The official Lua documentation is very helpful and thorough. There are also a large number of online resources or books with lots of helpful information for beginners and advanced users alike.

Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler.

Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation).

When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K.

The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers.

Easy to learn.

Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can:

1. Implement critical parts in C
2. Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page:

LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C.

Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use.

The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming.

The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics:

• Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)).
• Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()).

Due to the growing popularity, Lua has a rather large and helpful community surrounding it.

F#'s syntax tends to be terse while remaining very readable and easy to understand without being a chore to write.

Since F# is not a purely functional language, it lends itself to being more easily picked up by programmers that have experience with other paradigms.

Since F# runs on the Common Language Runtime or CLR, it has access to the entire .NET Framework, as well as libraries written in other .NET languages such as C#, VB.NET, and C++/CLI.

Forget Xamarin and Mono. F# now runs on the multiplatform .Net Core!

Thanks to a project like Fable, you can write and run your client app in F# and run it over JavaScript. It allows you to share code between your server and client.

This is a .Net language natively supported by Visual Studio. Though it is not as tooled up as C# the support is still substantial. In particular, C# deployment scenarios can be enabled for it with small C# wrapper projects. Integration with Visual Studio provides: IntelliSense, debugging, projects an other features.

F# directs you into a workflow where the right way is the path of least resistance.

Coming from a C# background, its restrictions might feel arbitrary at first (e.g., what do you mean my code has to be in dependency order!? Arbitrary alphabetical or bust!), but you'll soon realize that your code is cohesive, concise and consistent in a way that it never was before - and you can compile and run with confidence!

Thanks to Xamarin, F# is a functional language that you can use to build for iOS, Android and Windows.