[QuaternionsBhop]

After 10 years and many projects, the greatest with 40k lines of code including a time-of-intersection-solving single body physics system, I have come to know how to use Lua for my purposes. Even so, from the moment I started watching Rust hype videos on YouTube, I knew I would eventually be converted into a Rust fanatic. At the end of a 2 year project to rewrite my Lua game with a new physics system, I felt it was a good time to learn Rust (and rewrite the game again in Rust). So far I have spent 6 months in Rust and my old tool looks like a toy. How did I ever live without iterators, algebraic data types, the safety of a strong type system, and especially separate types for arrays and hashmaps for god sakes?

Lua makes the scope of learning programming smaller compared to other languages, so it is probably fair to say that it is a good language to learn programming with. However, knowing the details of heap vs stack, array vs hashmap, and explaining that to someone learning programming for the first time within a language that attempts to hide those details is frustrating. I can't see the smaller picture and view a table simply as a thing that you get and set values from, I can't see the weak types as anything more than an annoying source of bugs at runtime, and I crave the borrow checker which saves me from myself.

My 10 years of Lua set me up to appreciate Rust's fantastic design choices, and I'm having a great time in Rust land. I wish to remain in Rust land but my finances demand me to use my Lua skills at least a little while longer. End of ramble

[_ugfj]

The fanaticism of Rust programmers are well known and off putting. Why, one of them just posted about it into a Lua thread. It couldn't be less relevant. Much as I don't have a hard choice between picking assembly and PHP for a task, Rust and Lua are just not in the same problem space.

[umvi]

I read his post less as Rust fanaticism and more someone who has learned their first programming language isn't perfect - strong types? iterators? These are all things that are present in many languages, it just sounds like Lua is lacking them and he is discovering some of the cool features of other languages.

[brink]

People complaining about Rust evangelism is about as much of a trope as the Rust evangelism.

Though I would rather spend my days listening to people talk about what they love rather than what they hate, so your response is more tiresome than the person you're replying to.

[pfg_]

I think they are. Rust is a general purpose programming language, and Lua is a language specifically designed to be embeddable. But that means if you're making a project that embeds Lua, like Factorio for example, you have the choice of what language you write the code in. The choice is whether to write a function as native or to write it in Lua, and that choice might not be super clear unless someone else already made that choice for you.

This is completely different than assembly vs PHP. Assembly is a 'don't use it unless you have to' programming language, while PHP is a programming language designed for website building. You wouldn't use assembly to make a website because there are no frameworks for it and you'll scream and cry. You wouldn't use PHP to write the entrypoint to your operating system because PHP can't do that.

Rust and Lua are a lot closer together than PHP and assembly and it often would be reasonable to compare these languages for the same problems. It's not relevant at all to the blog post though because the engine they're using is built for Lua, and it's not really up to them unless they want to work against the engine and try to use a different language.

[IshKebab]

I think he was just offering the perspective of someone else that has also written a lot of Lua.

> The fanaticism of Rust programmers...

Honestly the endless criticism of Rust "fanatics" is far more tedious than anything Rust developers say. Rust is a fantastic language. Do you expect people not to talk about it?

[akira2501]

> knowing the details of heap vs stack, array vs hashmap, and explaining that to someone learning programming for the first time within a language that attempts to hide those details is frustrating

These are implementation artifacts. Knowing how to program does not require any knowledge of them.

> and my old tool looks like a toy.

The great thing about toys is they are very easy to put down for a while and then pick back up again later with very little effort.

[idoubtit]

> The great thing about toys is they are very easy to put down for a while and then pick back up again later with very little effort.

That matches my experience.

I've written programs in Haskell, and it was very satisfying. But going back to the project after 6 months of work in other languages was very hard. I took some time to remember the concepts, the abstractions and what the cryptic operators meant in their contexts. I've kept away of Rust for this reason: maintenance would be hard if I only dabble episodicly in Rust.

On the other side, my own experience with Lua was not very nice. I contributed (and patched for my needs) Koreader, an ebook reader with 180k lines of Lua. The lack of explicit types and data structures was a strong impediment. And the language has subtle traps... Everything is a table, but not all tables are equals: some tables are sequences (indexed by 1..n) with special operators (like # whose result is undetermined for other tables (which hurts like the famous Undefined Behavior of C++). With Lua, simple questions like "Is this table empty?" or "What is the size of a table?" are too hard for beginners.

So, complex artefacts are hard to go back after a long break, but many toys break easily when you come back after a pause, having forgotten how fragile they were.

[QuaternionsBhop]

I agree with this, but my point was that I cannot hide the details from myself, and will bring them up when they are relevant and confuse my poor friend just trying to learn Lua.

Definitely very little effort picking up my toy again after a 6 month break

[15155]

The zen comes from knowing when to carefully embed a Lua interpreter into your Rust program.

[interroboink]

I haven't used Rust, but lots of C++ — do you ever find the strongly-typed and compiler-driven approach constraining, compared to Lua?

Like, in C++ if I want to change the API for something, I need to update a few different places (header, implementation, maybe some downstream typedefs, etc.), maybe recompile a library or two, then re-run the application, whereas in a more loosly-typed and "interpreted" language like Lua, I can rely on duck typing and such, make my edits and save, and the code is immediately live.

The iteration cycle can be very short, if the system is built that way.

Anyway, maybe I just come from the opposite end of the spectrum, so Lua feels like a breath of fresh air sometimes vs. writing everything in a stricter language. My project is also very amenable to that, though.

[xedrac]

As a long time C++ developer with only a few years in Rust, C++ is downright painful in comparison. However, I still cannot iterate in Rust as quickly as I can in Lua, unless the project is large and complex, then I'd argue that I can work faster in Rust. Languages like Python, Lua, Lisp really struggle in large projects because it becomes way too easy to break things unknowingly.

[QuaternionsBhop]

I know that I would have found strong types constraining when I first started learning Lua in 2009, but do you ever really need to change the type of a variable after you create it? I did a lot of hacks using ternary true-false-nil and drive-by appending random state to a table it doesn't belong in, to be recalled later in some other random place in the code. The lack of rules makes even following your own ideas of structure easy to cheat and subvert.

I think your comment about opposite end of the spectrum has merit, because I find the strict rules to be refreshingly binding to my coding ideals. Rust is ergonomic to think in, and I have even used it to prototype things before implementing them in Lua.

To me, Rust vs Lua is changing a struct and then simply following the chain of compiler errors instead of trying to remember every last place a mushy table gets manipulated.

[umvi]

Iteration cycle of strongly typed languages can be very short too, if you pick the right technologies. Rust (and c++), unfortunately, has pretty long compile times compared to, say, Go.

The problem with loosely typed languages is that you don't find out until runtime that you have a problem. And if the problem is inside an if statement that users only hit 1% of the time, you might not find it at all except in the form of users very occasionally complaining that it sometimes crashes unexpectedly.

[criddell]

IDEs are getting pretty good at refactoring these days. I do changes like that in Visual Studio and it has gotten remarkable good in the last few years.

[secondcoming]

There are techniques in C++ that can prevent this situation somewhat but it comes at the expense of indirection (see pimpl).

[wsc981]

> So far I have spent 6 months in Rust and my old tool looks like a toy. How did I ever live without iterators, algebraic data types, the safety of a strong type system, and especially separate types for arrays and hashmaps for god sakes?

I programmed in many languages with similar features (C#, Java, Swift, Objective-C) and programming in Lua is refreshing to me.

In daytime I can deal with doing C# at office, but at home, Lua is more fun to me. Great for hobby projects. Would probably love programming full-time with Lua as well (if I could make money with game dev).

[marcosdumay]

"Second System Effect from Within - A Documentary"