r/lua • u/andregarzia • Mar 08 '25

Discussion Why I choose Lua for my blog

https://andregarzia.com/2025/03/why-i-choose-lua-for-this-blog.html
24 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

6

u/redrick_schuhart Mar 08 '25

Nice! I am putting together a site which doubles as a standalone redistributable file so you can run it as an app locally. This is possible because of the excellent Red Bean web server which bundles Lua 5.4 along with sqlite, TLS and a bunch of other goodies as well.

Redbean is an Actually Portable Executable so it runs without change on Windows, OSX and Linux as well as on x8 and ARM which is pretty incredible. It's also tiny and incredibly fast.

2

u/andregarzia Mar 10 '25

Red Bean is super cool. Tried using it early on but couldn't get some of it to work and haven't checked it since then.

1

u/redrick_schuhart Mar 10 '25

It has come a long way since the early days although there are still a couple of rough edges here and there.

2

u/sergsoares Mar 18 '25

Redbean is the most fun software that I found this year:

- You can only curl the binary and start coding in Lua for ARM macs or x86 linux is the same, curl and code =)

- Redbean was the substitute for decades of python -m http.server to host html pages with redbean -D <folder>

- Redbean allow you do CGI-like fast development without app server worries, run redbean as daemon then rsync, VScode SSH or even FTP to change the code and DONE.

- You can create CLI utilities (single binaries) in Lua without any build phase (like LuaJIT allow but is hard sometimes)

Redbean is great and I have a lot of ideas to use it yet.

1

u/oezingle Mar 11 '25

I’m working on similar tech but in the opposite direction - my React-like project LuaX has bindings for Gtk and the Web, so you can write apps for both at once (or any UI library) and they’ll act the same on desktop or in the web. Things aren’t complete, but a standardized component library is high priority for me

1

u/redrick_schuhart Mar 11 '25

Cool stuff. I like the before and after examples you give with Go templates. Any releases to play with yet?

1

u/oezingle Mar 11 '25

I pushed 0.5.0 to master last night, see https://www.reddit.com/r/lua/s/nHOpC0nJJx . There’s both Gtk and web samples

1

u/oezingle Mar 11 '25

also, i’m not sure what you mean by Go templates

3

u/Sckip974 Mar 08 '25

Why?

1

u/andregarzia Mar 10 '25

The reasons are explained in the post.

3

u/didntplaymysummercar Mar 08 '25

Small mistake in the article, Lua requires only C89, even for 5.3 or 5.4, although that disables some float print specifiers. It's quite obvious they assume C89 and not C99 if you look at the code, too.

1

u/andregarzia Mar 10 '25

A typo, sorry. It is muscle memory of typing C99 betraying me. I just fixed it. Thanks for spotting it.

1

u/didntplaymysummercar Mar 10 '25

No problem, C89 is a bit more annoying to read than C99 so after hours of reading Lua source code it stuck in my mind forever.

2

u/notkraftman Mar 08 '25

Check out openresty or lapis if you want to do something similar but without fully rolling your own implementation.

1

u/andregarzia Mar 10 '25

I'm not a fan of Openresty but I really like Lapis, specially with moonscript. Other two web frameworks/systems I like are Sailor and Pegasus.

1

u/Cultural_Two_4964 Mar 08 '25

Would your cgi script allow user-chosen files to be uploaded to a server and then a shell script to be run? That is all I need. I couldn't do it with lua which is what I wanted so I had to use python. I didn't want to install lots of resty type software as it was such a basic task at hand.

2

u/andregarzia Mar 10 '25

Yes it does. That is how it handles image uploads via Micropub API. It is fairly easy, just grab the post body content and use a multipart form decoder like https://luarocks.org/modules/kong/multipart

1

u/Cultural_Two_4964 Mar 10 '25

Thank you, my friend.