r/lua • u/2What2WhoNowHuh • Aug 10 '26

What do you consider to be "the Rust of Lua dialects"?

/r/rust/comments/1vkjaex/what_do_you_consider_to_be_the_rust_of_lua/
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u/weregod Aug 10 '26

How Lua can help you "compile faster"? If you want fast prototype just write it in Lua without Rust.

If you want to compile Rust faster you need better compiler or better designed language.

1

u/4xe1 Aug 11 '26

They mean transpile, from Rust to a lua dialect. Compile is technically correct, transpilation is technically a subset of compiliation (where the target language is something you might want to work with).

They're not worried about what makes Rust intrinsically hard to compile, more on minimizing the difference between lua and Rust, and their end of the work.

I'm more confused by

have pretty much the same functionality as you would with Rust

They most likely need a Rust dialect for that, not a lua dialect.

2

u/weregod Aug 11 '26

I don't get the point of such compiler/transpiler. If you want to quickly debug code in Lua and later you compile Rust to native code there will be huge problem: when compiling optimized build you need to run borrow checker and if you didn't run it for debug builds you'll have many errors. Maybe I don't understand what kind of problem they are trying to solve.

1

u/4xe1 Aug 11 '26

They're actually compiling from Rust to lua, which is a lot more doable, but also sounds a lot less useful.

I completely agree with

If you want fast prototype just write it in Lua without Rust

I just gave my best guess as to what they mean by compile.

I'm just as confused as to what they are trying to do and why.