The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.
Note that some of those can't run on a regular Lua runtime.
Luau is a separate implementation of a Lua dialect. However, it's backed by Roblox and being increasingly used in high budget games such as Alan Wake 2, and tools like Rive.
And Terra is more of a low-level language embedded in regular Lua for metaprogramming, than a statically-typed Lua.
In this vein there's also Pallene, which integrates better with regular Lua on a slightly-patched Lua runtime.
Also it looks like[1] Luau is the official Roblox Studio scripting language, and is baed on Lua 5.1 (possibly LuaJIT?) which means it's behind mainstream Lua.
Not sure which Lua versions the others are based on.
These are fine times. Just need a little extra cash for cigars, that's all. Had two yesterday, made the money by selling Premium Snowballs in Chicago for $2 each (made $50 that day). Life is fun.
That list (or any similar list) would be so helpful if it had a health column, something that takes into account number of contributors, time since last commit, number of forks, number of commits, etc. So many projects are effectively dead but it's not obvious at first sight, and it takes 2 or 3 whole minutes to figure out. That seems short but it adds up when evaluating a project, causing people to just go to a well known solution like Lua (and why not? Lua is just fine; in fact it's great).
Yeah this is why the syntax is customizable.. maybe it’s not optimal.
The example I gave was strange and I’ll have to change it. Not sure what I was trying to show there. The basic syntax is just:
for counter in <1, 5> print(counter)
backfor counter in <1, 5> print(counter)
It’s not overloaded because ‘for’ is basically a macro, expanding to ‘iterate, increment counter, break on counter > 5’ where ‘>’ is hard-coded. If ‘for’ was a fundamental operator then yes, there would be a step option and it would be factored into the exit condition.
You’ve got me thinking, there’s probably a way to overload it even as a macro.. hmmm…
Just do for counter in <1, 5>.rev(), which would iterate in a reversed range.
IMO it's poinless to distinguish synctactically between iterating forwards and backwards, specially if you also support things like for counter in <1, 5>.map({ return args[1] * 2) to irate on even numbers (the double of each number), rather than having to define a fordoubled macro. I mean, adding method like map and rev to ranges is more orthogonal and composes better. (See for example iterators in Rust)
Not that I don't like syntactic flexibility. I am a big fan of Ruby's unless, for example
“IMO it's pointless to distinguish syntactically between iterating forwards and backwards” — I completely agree. It’s really a compiler-macro limitation that’s preventing me from doing this.. though I don’t have to go that route.
I think what you’re suggesting would require the <a, b> syntax to produce a proper iterator type, which it doesn’t currently do. That’s definitely worth considering — then you could attach methods, etc.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll think about the best way to fix this..
> (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again
Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.
I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.
I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.
TikTok's algorithm is significantly better and therefore more addictive. I'm speaking from personal experience, having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024. Getting banned from it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Too bad it only happened in Jan 2025. Will never get that year back, or the mental health I lost from it. (I'm not going to sue, though I could definitely win such a suit.)
> having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024
That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.
This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.
Sometimes when I notice friends drop off from attending things or talking in group chats, if it's because they have fallen in some pit of social media / internet addiction. I agree it's probably more common than we think because the people who have fallen in to this state are the least visible.
"I'm speaking from personal experience, having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024"
My jaw is on the floor... Can you provide details of your usage, were you just going through video after video for 12-14 hours or were you involved in content production or something?
Scrolling videos, commenting, expanding my algorithm by searching for similar stuff to what I liked, sometimes watching lives, sometimes hosting lives or joining lives. Maybe about 70% scrolling videos and 28% lives and 2% creating.
I should mention that I was very financially successful due to TikTok. Around Christmas of 2023, my book got over 20M views and shot up to #122 on all Amazon books, until KDP just stopped offering it within a few hours. I wonder how high it would have gone.
But due to that success, I lost both drive and purpose. I had already made it, and it wasn't clear what else I could offer the world. So while I thought about it, I scrolled to pass the time. But that scrolling was endless and addictive. And I never made any progress on figuring out the question of what I'm good for.
KDP usually cuts off high volume sales at a certain point, in order to give other books a fair amount of copies to print on demand. Usually it takes a few weeks of sales, but I sold so many copies that evening, from a single 10M view video that someone posted, so they cut it off that night for two or three weeks I think.
I don't know why they do that, but it's really the main (only?) drawback to KDP.
My guess is that they do expand, but only when genuinely needed for long-term. They probably keep a certain amount of blank books in stock, and ration them out to PoD books somewhat evenly, with established books getting higher priority.
This was the video that singlehandedly got me all those sales I mentioned earlier: https://www.tiktok.com/@alwayscandid/video/73180668430448755... ... honestly it's quite poetic how it all turned out. I did almost no work making a book, I made way more money than I ever deserved, I wasted all of it, and now I'm sleeping in my car. It's very fair, it's more than fair. It's generous.
Those are not crazy numbers for unemployed people.
If you want a real shocker: TikTok is EXTREMELY popular amongst 60+ men, consuming stuff like teenagers plus super naive...
Just check out hospitals or elderly shelter thing.
This is wild, what were the effects like for you? I imagine your eyes and hands would start to see physical effects from that level of use for such a consistent time.
What sort of social changes did you notice after that period of time?
I've never used TikTok, but the techniques they employ sounds seriously addictive.
The main one is a deep sense of defeat. The app would keep me there longer than I want. I would waste money ordering doordash, or lose sleep, or get drunk, or all of the above. Each time, I'd feel like I set myself back a little too far. I'd try to ignore the feeling, but wouldn't know what to do. What's the default action? Keep scrolling. And of course I'd just keep missing more such personal deadlines. Then I'd feel more defeated, and keep scrolling. It just spirals further and further down, far past rock bottom. Maybe it's what advancing the Kola Superdeep Borehole felt like.
Thank you for the reply. I get that feeling, I've felt it in smaller doses in other contexts. There's a sense of resignation there where you keep doing something that you know is hurting you when you feel like you don't know another option and just can't muster the fortitude to escape that cycle of guilt.
I have... so many questions. Not the least of which is, why? I gave TikTok maybe 10 minutes of my time, once a year just to see what others are seeing. And each time, it was always meaningless junk. I'd uninstall the app after; it does nothing for me. Why did it captivate you?
I’m similar. I’ve installed the TikTok app a half a dozen times and it just doesn’t click for me.
YouTube I enjoy more, but I still don’t spend much time on it. I mostly go on there looking for something in particular and don’t spend much time scrolling. Their recommendations are terrible and creators chasing the algorithm is making every interesting corner round.
Instagram I like. I love to see updates from friends and family but that runs out quickly so I don’t end up spending much time there.
Facebook is good for their marketplace when I’m looking to buy something or give something away.
Mastodon is boring, X is offensive, posts on BlueSky and Threads feel fake and performative. LinkedIn is full of journeys and learnings and I’m not interested in either.
HN is the only social media site I visit with any kind of frequency.
Not 12-14 hours but the novelty-seeking of new stories and discussion topics is a compelling escape (especially since it'll just be "a few minutes" I think to myself) and then I end up getting drawn into conversations and seeing new thread responses I should respond to, both of which may result in going down additional rabbit holes in order to back up the response...
These short 'dopamine hits' are anywhere. As a kid I really loved reading encyclopedias, even read dictionaries for 'enjoyment'. Wikipedia was awful for me.
Nobody ever saw it as a bad thing though, many people even encouraged me. Looking back at it 90% what I read was absolutely useless besides some novelty and being useful for quizzes.
Wonder what I could've done with all the time I lost, probably changed my behaviour in general. Can't imagine how much tiktok changes these kids.
There have been some attempts:
Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)
Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)
Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)
Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)
The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.
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