Awesome Lua

A curated list of quality Lua packages and resources.

Inspired by the lists awesome, awesome-awesomeness, and awesome-nodejs.

Packages

• Implementations, Interpreters, and Bindings
• Package Managers
• Build Tools and Standalone Makers
• Debugging and Profiling
• IDEs and Plugins
• Utility Belts
• Game Engines
• Game Development
• Logging
• Web/Networking Platforms
• OpenResty
• Command-line Utilities
• Concurrency and Multithreading
• Templating
• Documentation
• Object-oriented Programming
• File system and OS
• Time and Date
• Image Manipulation
• Digital Signal Processing
• Hardware and Embedded Systems
• Math and Scientific Computing
• Parsing and Serialization
• Humanize
• Compression
• Cryptography
• Network
• Data Stores
• Message Brokers
• Testing
• Foreign Function Interfaces
• Analysis Tools and ASTs
• Experimental, etc
• Scriptable by Lua
• Miscellaneous

Resources

• Community
• References
• Style Guides
• Tutorials
• Articles
• Talks & Slides
• Books
• Other Lists

Implementations, Interpreters, and Bindings

• Lua - Lua's original ANSI C interpreter.
• Lua Repo - The official Lua repo, as seen by the Lua team, mirrored to GitHub.
• LuaJIT - High-performance Just-In-Time compiler for Lua.
• LLVM-Lua - Compiles Lua to LLVM.
• lua.vm.js - Lua VM on the web; a direct port of the C interpreter via LLVM, emscripten, and asm.js.
• Moonshine - A Lua VM implemented in JavaScript. Slower than lua.vm.js, but with better docs, examples, and JS interfacing.
• Fengari - The Lua VM rewritten in Javascript with seamless JS and DOM interoperability.
• MoonSharp - A Lua interpreter written entirely in C# for the .NET, Mono and Unity platforms.
• UniLua - A pure C# implementation of Lua 5.2, focused on compatibility with the Unity game engine.
• lupa - Python bindings to LuaJIT2.
• golua - Golang bindings to the Lua C API.
• GopherLua - Lua 5.1 VM and compiler implemented in Go with Go APIs.
• LuaBridge - A lightweight library for mapping data, functions, and classes back and forth between C++ and Lua.

Note: From LuaJIT to Lua to lua.vm.js to Moonshine, a basic benchmark sees performance drop by roughly a factor of 6 with each hop.

Package Managers

• LuaRocks - De-facto tool for installing Lua modules as packages called "rocks", plus public rock repository and website. Much like npm or pip.

Build Tools and Standalone Makers

• Lake - A build engine written in Lua, similar to Ruby's rake.
• Luabuild - Highly customizable Lua 5.2 build system.
• luastatic - Simple tool for turning Lua programs into standalone executables.
• omnia - A batteries-included creator of standalone executables, built on top of luastatic.

Debugging and Profiling

• ProFi - Simple profiler that works with LuaJIT and produces a report file.
• luatrace - Toolset for tracing/analyzing/profiling script execution and generating detailed reports.
• StackTracePlus - Drop-in upgrade to Lua's stack traces which adds local context and improves readability.
• MobDebug - Powerful remote debugger with breakpoints and stack inspection. Used by ZeroBraneStudio.