The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

Anyway, that's all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.

[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

That’s a pretty crazy use of Lua if I may say so.

It is possible to craft continue-like logic in lua, however, with (out of all things) goto statements.

For example, I have the following code in my dotfiles:

	for _, lang in pairs(loopvar) do
		if condition then
			goto continue
		end
		<do whatever the loop actually does>
		::continue::
	end

Of course the continue could be called anything. Really felt uncomfortable resorting to this way but it is possible :-)

[–] scrion@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago

I mean, Lua is a pretty "interesting" choice for that application, but don't blame shitty coding practices and inexperienced coders on the language.

The gigantic loop could have been cleaned up with a table, registering handlers for the individual cases.

Lua is probably not the best choice for a web service, but it definitely has its applications.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I kinda got a bad taste from LUA when I was introduced to it via it being added in GMOD. It quickly led to me quitting the game because through it, you had remote control access possibilities just by running into the wrong player.

Like, I know that's not common but it took a while to actually learn it after that lol

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 hours ago

That doesn't really seem like a lua issue

[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Can you expand on that?

I was running a tiny bit of garrsymod many years ago and didn’t know there were any RCEs. Unfortunately I can't find any news reports talking about it either at a quick glance?

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 1 hour ago

When LUA scripting was first added to the game it had basically no guard rails and it was possible to write up LUA scripts that could download and execute files on your machine from within the game.

[–] Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

Is there even an ecosystem? I don't think I have heard of anything for Lua itself, just the stuff that embed it.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

There is luarocks, which is better than nothing, but it's not great.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 11 points 12 hours ago

There is. luarocks is basically the "pip" equivalent for lua, it installs packages (called "rocks") and manages dependencies. These packages can extend lua with all sorts of practical capabilities.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Ruby on Rails. 🚂🚃🚋🚃

[–] protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 8 hours ago

trams when?

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 11 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

My Lua experience is about 15 years old at this point, but back then I recall Luarocks had like 10 packages that were actually stable and maintained. Basically a ghost town. I’m gonna guess it hasn’t gotten much better.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

It's a lot better, but a lot haven't been updated in ages, usually some random dependency to a package won't install because of some compilation error.