51 engineers on Hacker News describe using Lua first-hand: 13 endorse it, 8 regret it, 2 are mixed.
“Lua is being so dynamically typed makes it not great for large-scale software engineering.”
mixed · production · corysama · 2025-05-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm”
regret · production · isaacimagine · 2025-05-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we replaced "mobprog" scripting with Lua based progs back in 2007/2008 and it has been the single best change we ever made”
endorse · production · 17 yr · Lasher · 2025-03-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Once upon a time Supreme Commander used Lua. Perf on consoles for SupCom2 was catastrophically bad. We switched to Kore”
regret · production · forrestthewoods · 2024-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently started using Lua and I'm not impressed at all.”
regret · personal · leptons · 2024-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“There were ton of things we solved with Lua, which wasn't ideal. ... 1-based array indexes, plus no static types.”
regret · production · cakoose · 2022-02-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Lua is a somewhat odd but perfectly sane language that you can pick up in a day... But Lua is a breeze.”
endorse · personal · leephillips · 2021-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I build Lua programs in prod.”
endorse · production · summarity · 2019-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My previous employer embedded way too much Lua script inside Nginx plugins for the same reasons (it's easy). Even at our "scale" (50 requests/second) we had constant issues.”
regret · production · nullwasamistake · 2019-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved to Lua (0 dependencies) soon after... Lua is really the undisputed king when it comes to embedding and flexibility”
endorse · production · armitron · 2019-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“to me it was a very unpleasing experience. I found that the thing was hard to test and hard to maintain.”
regret · production · daddykotex · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've recently been using Lua, and I love it.”
endorse · personal · alexeldeib · 2017-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“also so far we've supported both luajit and puc lua (and intend to drop puc lua because of ffi and a few other niggles)”
regret · production · rasterman · 2016-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I see hardly any benefit in using Lua without openresty for web development”
mixed · production · wink · 2015-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I really like lua, and have been using openresty(nginx+lua) apart from lua inside openwrt environments.”
endorse · personal · tavish1 · 2015-07-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The ability to run Lua scripts from within is great.”
endorse · production · pwm · 2015-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it is quite an elegant language. I could get an authentication plugin running after looking at an existing one”
endorse · production · xorcist · 2014-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Never had to change the config or adapt to API changes as I had with LUA and things just work.”
regret · personal · th0br0 · 2014-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Now Lua is my most preferred language and I have been using it for about two years.”
endorse · personal · 2 yr · djent · 2013-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Lua for the WAF (as Mike says), but also for all request processing.”
endorse · production · cloudflare · 2013-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So I stick with C++ for things that need speed, and I use Lua for things that don't”
endorse · production · SomeCallMeTim · 2012-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Lua is well-designed and well-understood as an embedded language (how we use it). That means it was easy and fast for us to integrate.”
endorse · production · smarx · 2012-10-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Python is to Perl and Lua is to Python along those lines. I've moved on.”
endorse · personal · silentbicycle · 2010-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Gemini / Antigravity to make a virtual pet for my kids using Love2D / lua.”
neutral · personal · boca_honey · 2025-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had never used LUA and when I started out I was reading code examples and writing LUA code”
neutral · production · tharkun__ · 2024-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we did end up with lua to talk to redis or memcached to do some traffic shaping at one point.”
neutral · production · hinkley · 2024-09-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For the benchmarks I did my best writing good Lua, but I am not a pro.”
neutral · personal · fwsgonzo · 2024-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was originally a nginx+lua service that we migrated to Haskell as the requirements became more complex.”
neutral · production · aviaviavi · 2023-03-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“still use fennel anywhere I'm forced to use lua, including hammerspoon and mud client scripting.”
neutral · personal · giraffe_lady · 2022-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I actually measured it. It was around 65-85ns for Lua and 55ns for LuaJIT”
neutral · personal · fwsgonzo · 2022-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've replaced nginx/lua with a cache server”
neutral · production · totallyunknown · 2022-09-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The original implementation of this service was in Redis using lua scripts.”
neutral · production · jhgg · 2021-02-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we used it for quite a while, until we moved to using Lua for that.”
neutral · production · SaveTheRbtz · 2020-07-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we focused on text-based configuration, Lua scripting, fast asset baking and hot-reloading of everything mid-game.”
neutral · production · corysama · 2020-02-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our own edge nodes with lots of OpenResty/Lua”
neutral · production · manish_gill · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“through this I learned Lua, Love2D and a little Unity.”
neutral · personal · dave7 · 2018-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I did that today to swap the content of two plain objects without altering the references. It was in Lua”
neutral · production · mabynogy · 2017-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have a side-project in Io lang and I know Lua quite well”
neutral · personal · klibertp · 2017-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we post from the client to nginx, nginx+lua timestamps and posts that to nsq”
neutral · production · mattbillenstein · 2017-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Over at howl.io we've been working on another Lua/moonscript based editor.”
neutral · production · shalabhc · 2017-04-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“wrote a Lua module (...) for it. I used that to write another Lua module”
neutral · personal · spc476 · 2016-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's recently replaced my old favorites like matlab / python / lua.”
neutral · personal · divbit · 2016-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run dedicated download / stream servers with some nice Lua scripts for caching the files”
neutral · production · iagooar · 2015-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Later we've moved to Lua because of the performance and because the code in LIL quickly became unreadable.”
neutral · production · zserge · 2015-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was pretty easy to build in under 100 lines of Lua code.”
neutral · personal · dividuum · 2015-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd mostly been using Lua at the time, and didn't really understand what was different with goroutines vs. coroutines.”
neutral · personal · ansible · 2014-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We replaced that with nginx + lua (openresty module)”
neutral · production · rdrock · 2014-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We used Route53 latency based routing to route traffic to that dedicated servers + Nginx + LUA.”
neutral · production · hurrycane · 2014-03-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Openresty (with Lua and Redis support) to collect a large amount of data from GET requests”
neutral · production · decktech · 2012-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Lua would be the fourth, for in-engine scripting only.”
neutral · production · Ogre · 2011-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“certainly my iPad is good enough for editing lua scripts”
neutral · personal · seclorum · 2011-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?