Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler

Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler(github.com)

31 points by timcameronryan 14 years ago | 15 comments

Hey all, I'm posting this to HN to see if there's any interest in a full-fledged JavaScript port to Lua. Colony right now is a proof-of-concept, but there might be a real use case out there for embeddable JavaScript where solutions like V8 would simply be too large.

Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tutorials of the Corona SDK (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/, a cross-platform mobile SDK that uses Lua) by programming CoffeeScript instead, which was surprisingly fun.

nieve 14 years ago | |

Interesting idea and possibly worth tossing out to the World of Warcraft addons/scripting community (single largest Lua end-user install base in the world, I believe) as well?

BTW, the name seems a bit tacky for a language developed in Brazil given the colonial history. Was there another reason for naming it that I've missed?

justincormack 14 years ago | |

Hmm, you could target iphone wax https://github.com/probablycorey/wax to make a coffescript dev environment for iOS. Wax is a really nice environment.

Using javascript as a language instead of Lua for scripting though seems odd, as Lua is pretty easy to use instead.

leafo 14 years ago | |

If you like CoffeeScript you should try out http://moonscript.org

CoffeeScript inspired syntax that compiles right to Lua.

ZitchDog 14 years ago |

Lua is a great language. I personally would rather go the other way and use Lua instead of JS in the browser.

This is cool though from a hacking perspective. Good work.

fab13n 14 years ago |

In which cases would anyone need:

- to write code in JS rather than in Lua;

- and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS?

Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.

zhemao 14 years ago | |

Many C applications use Lua as an embedded scripting language. This program would be very useful if the developers of the application wanted to extend scripting support to Javascript (and compile-to-JS languages) without having to modify their C code.

fab13n 14 years ago | | |

But a transcompiler will always be a kludge, at least when the target language hasn't been designed as a bytecode.

Most importantly, I'd bet that the intersection of developers who:

(1) can write good software; and

(2) Can write decent JS code, but can't become proficient in Lua within a couple of days;

is mostly empty.

finnw 14 years ago | | |

But if they are developers why would they not want to modify their own C code (to add an embeddable JS interpreter?)

friggeri 14 years ago |

The fun thing about transpilers is that you can chain them together. Waiting to see some C stuff ported to Lua using Emscripten via JS.

vorg 14 years ago | |

Perhaps the best way to write a transpiler so there's no bugs is to write two of them at the same time, i.e. in this case Lua-to-JS and JS-to-Lua. Maybe it's easier to catch bugs.

This mirrors the idea of writing a compiler for a new language in itself as soon as possible.

beagle3 14 years ago | |

Get a Clue: http://cluecc.sourceforge.net/

Decent timing from LuaJIT1 when it was generating "dirty" Lua bytecode.

meric 14 years ago |

I remember google's dart that compiled to javascript which ran 7% as fast as hand-written javascript. I wonder what the performance for this will be compared to handwritten lua? I've tried wrapping everything into tables like this in lua, and there definitely is a performance penalty.

I guess programmers will always be programmers. "Ooo look, this year CPU speed has quadtripled! Let's make a compiler for X to Y which will reduce performance by only 75%; It means you can run it at the same speed as running hand-written Y last year!"

I'll cringe when I see someone creating a WoW addon using this.