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Comment by upofadown

17 hours ago

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.

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upofadown

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ksymph  15 hours ago

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.

  • shmerl  15 hours ago

    I don't see a reason not to update LuaJIT still. Changes in Lua aren't just version numbers, it should be improving something, meaning that would be missing in LuaJIT.

    • ksymph  14 hours ago

      LuaJIT does have some backported features from newer versions. But Mike Pall -- the mad genius behind LuaJIT -- has made it clear he doesn't agree with many of the changes made in newer versions, hence why it's staying where it's at.

shmerl  16 hours ago

Language fork is unfortunate. Python situation isn't much of a fork really. Python 2 is basically EOL.