Lua vs Rust

Overview

Rust

Stacks6.1K

Followers5.0K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars107.6K

Forks13.9K

Lua

Stacks2.5K

Followers1.0K

Votes180

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks452

Lua vs Rust: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Lua and Rust

Memory Management:
- Lua: Lua uses automatic garbage collection for memory management. It frees developers from manual memory management tasks such as allocation and deallocation.
- Rust: Rust has a unique ownership system that combines automatic memory management with control over memory allocation. It guarantees memory safety without the need for garbage collection.
Type System:
- Lua: Lua is dynamically typed, allowing for flexibility in variable types. This means that variables can change type during runtime.
- Rust: Rust is statically typed, requiring variables to have a declared type that cannot be changed during runtime. This enables compile-time type checks that prevent certain errors.
Concurrency Model:
- Lua: Lua has a cooperative concurrency model, where multiple processes or threads share CPU time voluntarily. It does not have built-in support for parallelism.
- Rust: Rust has a concurrency model that supports both threading and message passing. It provides primitives such as std::thread and std::sync to handle concurrent programming, allowing for efficient parallelism.
Error Handling:
- Lua: Lua uses a non-standard error handling mechanism based on the setjmp and longjmp functions, which are not part of the C standard. It relies on exceptions and a global error handling function.
- Rust: Rust has a built-in error handling system using the Result and Option types. It encourages the use of explicit error handling through returning and propagating errors, providing better control and safety.
Interop with Other Languages:
- Lua: Lua is often used as an embedded scripting language in applications written in other programming languages. It provides a simple C API for interop.
- Rust: Rust provides extensive interop capabilities with other languages, particularly C and C++. It supports direct function calls to and from Rust, as well as the ability to write and compile shared libraries.
Tooling and Ecosystem:
- Lua: Lua has a smaller and less extensive ecosystem compared to Rust. It has fewer libraries, tools, and frameworks available, but it is known for its simplicity and flexibility.
- Rust: Rust has a large and rapidly growing ecosystem, with a wide range of libraries, tools, and frameworks available. It has strong community support and is gaining popularity for systems programming.

In Summary, Lua and Rust differ in their memory management approaches, type systems, concurrency models, error handling mechanisms, interop capabilities, and tooling ecosystems.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Rust, Lua

Timm

VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH

Nov 10, 2020

Decided

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

682k views682k

Comments

Johan

Jan 28, 2021

Decided

Context: Writing an open source CLI tool.

Go and Rust over Python: Simple distribution.

With Go and Rust, just build statically compiled binaries and hand them out.

With Python, have people install with "pip install --user" and not finding the binaries :(.

Go and Rust over Python: Startup and runtime performance

Go and Rust over Python: No need to worry about which Python interpreter version is installed on the users' machines.

Go over Rust: Simplicity; Rust's memory management comes at a development / maintenance cost.

Go over Rust: Easier cross compiles from macOS to Linux.

397k views397k

Comments

Omar

Feb 23, 2021

Needs adviceon

Ruby

JavaScript

Rust

I was thinking about adding a new technology to my current stack (Ruby and JavaScript). But, I want a compiled language, mainly for speed and scalability reasons compared to interpreted languages. I have tried each one (Rust, Java, and Kotlin). I loved them, and I don't know which one can offer me more opportunities for the future (I'm in my first year of software engineering at university).

Which language should I choose?

443k views443k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rust	Lua
Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.	Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 107.6K	GitHub Stars 1.5K
GitHub Forks 13.9K	GitHub Forks 452
Stacks 6.1K	Stacks 2.5K
Followers 5.0K	Followers 1.0K
Votes 1.2K	Votes 180
Pros & Cons
Pros 146 Guaranteed memory safety 133 Fast 89 Open source 75 Minimal runtime 73 Pattern matching Cons 28 Hard to learn 24 Ownership learning curve 12 Unfriendly, verbose syntax 4 Many type operations make it difficult to follow 4 High size of builded executable	Pros 41 Fast learning curve 26 Efficient memory usage 26 Very easy to embed in C programs 20 Open source 19 Good for game scripting Cons 4 Nooby 2 Not widespread 1 D 0 Python

What are some alternatives to Rust, Lua?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Related Comparisons

Lua vs Rust: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Lua and Rust

Memory Management:
- Lua: Lua uses automatic garbage collection for memory management. It frees developers from manual memory management tasks such as allocation and deallocation.
- Rust: Rust has a unique ownership system that combines automatic memory management with control over memory allocation. It guarantees memory safety without the need for garbage collection.
Type System:
- Lua: Lua is dynamically typed, allowing for flexibility in variable types. This means that variables can change type during runtime.
- Rust: Rust is statically typed, requiring variables to have a declared type that cannot be changed during runtime. This enables compile-time type checks that prevent certain errors.
Concurrency Model:
- Lua: Lua has a cooperative concurrency model, where multiple processes or threads share CPU time voluntarily. It does not have built-in support for parallelism.
- Rust: Rust has a concurrency model that supports both threading and message passing. It provides primitives such as std::thread and std::sync to handle concurrent programming, allowing for efficient parallelism.
Error Handling:
- Lua: Lua uses a non-standard error handling mechanism based on the setjmp and longjmp functions, which are not part of the C standard. It relies on exceptions and a global error handling function.
- Rust: Rust has a built-in error handling system using the Result and Option types. It encourages the use of explicit error handling through returning and propagating errors, providing better control and safety.
Interop with Other Languages:
- Lua: Lua is often used as an embedded scripting language in applications written in other programming languages. It provides a simple C API for interop.
- Rust: Rust provides extensive interop capabilities with other languages, particularly C and C++. It supports direct function calls to and from Rust, as well as the ability to write and compile shared libraries.
Tooling and Ecosystem:
- Lua: Lua has a smaller and less extensive ecosystem compared to Rust. It has fewer libraries, tools, and frameworks available, but it is known for its simplicity and flexibility.
- Rust: Rust has a large and rapidly growing ecosystem, with a wide range of libraries, tools, and frameworks available. It has strong community support and is gaining popularity for systems programming.

In Summary, Lua and Rust differ in their memory management approaches, type systems, concurrency models, error handling mechanisms, interop capabilities, and tooling ecosystems.

Lua vs Rust

Overview

Lua vs Rust: What are the differences?