Comment by dividuum
19 hours ago
Not true. It's getting a constant stream of bugfixes. It's also not "stuck" on Lua 5.1, but is deliberately not following Lua's path, except for some backports. There's also a recent post about how a LuaJIT 3 might work.
Where is that post?
https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Question-about-LuaJIT-...
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OK, then I got some wrong info. If it's stuck at it deliberately, then it's worse. May be someone should fork it and bring it up to date with recent Lua versions. Why is this split needed?
My understanding is that there was a language fork after 5.1. One thing was a complete reworking of how math works. It used to be just floating point for everything but the new idea was to make it like Python 3. So most operations are float/integer with some weird exceptions.
As with any language fork there will be some who stay and others who switch to the new thing. Often a fork will drive people away from a particular language as in my case.
Lua's nature as a primarily embedded language means backwards compatibility is not guaranteed between any version. If 5.2 was a language fork then so was 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, etc. (5.2 did have some more significant changes though)
For that reason luajit staying at ~5.1 actually works in its favor. Rather than trying to follow the moving target of the newest version, it gives a robust focal point for the lua ecosystem, while modern versions can be developed and continue to serve their purpose in embedded systems and whatnot where appropriate.
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Language fork is unfortunate. Python situation isn't much of a fork really. Python 2 is basically EOL.
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The language is different. The changes to environments in particular are a non-starter. Sandboxing is incredibly clunky in 5.2+, and we lost a lot of metaprogramming power and dynamic behavior.
> May be someone should fork it and bring it up to date with recent Lua versions. Why is this split needed?
Good news, you're someone. If you care, you're welcome to go for it.
I strenuously disagree. Not every language needs to chase trends and pile on unnecessary complexity because developers want the latest shiny language toys to play with. It's good to have a simple, stable language that works and that you can depend on to remain sane for the forseeable future.
C is a language like that but I fear the feature creep is coming (auto? AUTO??.) JS is a lost cause.