/luascript

Lua to JS compiler

Primary LanguageJavaScript

LuaScript

Translate Lua 5.2 to Javascript.

This is 70% done. Mainly tables and metatables still need to be implemented and there is a bug in JISON holding part of the grammar.

Intrinsic limitations

Obviously, porting Lua to JavaScript has some feature limitations. Some of those limitations are obvious, like access to C endpoints, but some are not. These section outlines those limitations.

Syntax limitations

Those are limitations that happen at the syntax level:

  • Returning more than one value in a function is theoretically possible, but would greatly impact performance and therefore is disabled:

      function example()
    return 1, 2
  end

    Maybe ECMAScript Harmony will provide tools to make this more viable;

  • goto statements may be implemented, but are not supported currently;

STDLIB limitations

Limitations regarding STDLIB methods:

  • setmetatable does not support modifying __index and __newindex. ECMAScript's proxies will likely make this possible;

  • setfenv is not supported and probably never will;

Runtime limitations

  • Avoid tail recursion. They are not supported by JS runtimes;