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Add to SafariWhen comparing DASH vs Lua, the Slant community recommends Lua for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Lua is ranked 16th while DASH is ranked 52nd. The most important reason people chose Lua is:
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.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast startup
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
Pro Low memory usage, which matters a lot in embedded
It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX.
Pro Default shell on Debian systems
DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead.
Pro Full POSIX support
It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells.
Pro A perfect clone
It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell.
Pro Very easy to integrate with C and C++
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.
Pro Great documentation
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.
Pro Portable
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.
Pro Simple
Easy to learn.
Pro Fast
Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can:
- Implement critical parts in C
- 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.
Pro Embeddable
Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use.
Pro Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners
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()).
Pro Helpful community
Due to the growing popularity, Lua has a rather large and helpful community surrounding it.
Cons
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh.
Con Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables
When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs.
Con Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages
Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages.
Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages.
Con Batteries not included
Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight.
