At this point I see it as turn-off when a project like this uses Rust. Slow, massive tooling and such a huge barrier to entry, when we have Go, Zig or just C (this ends up being largely backed by libc/ucrt anyway?).
Cool to see a niche tool I use suddenly on hacker news! I just use it to serialize Roblox game assets, but I do wonder how many people are out there using it for non-roblox purposes.
This looks like a great alternative to TypeScript + Node.js which I currently use.
My main gripe with Lua (and thus Luau) is colons. It's so easy to forget them. Does the type checker catch this error? And if so, does it catch it every time, provided you always use types? If so, that could be good enough for me. Especially if it has strong LSP + VS Code support.
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Disclaimer: I've contributed to Lune multiple times and have contributed off and on to Luau as well.
For those who aren't familiar, Luau is a language based on Lua that is developed and maintained by Roblox. It's entirely open source (you can see the repo here: https://github.com/luau-lang/luau) and it's diverged a fair bit from Lua at this point. Most notably, it's quite a bit faster than the PUC-Rio distribution of Lua, has native vector support, and has a type checker. It's not as fast as LuaJIT, but it's about as fast as you can expect for a non-JITed language and it has support for AoT compiling to native instructions on x86 and aarch64, so it can be basically as fast as LuaJIT for some tasks.
It's worth reading the website: https://luau.org/
Lune itself is nice and I use it for basically all of the scripting needs I have. Some of the API is limited compared to what you'd get in other runtimes (the obvious example is hashing, where it's just "string in, string out" instead of a stream that you can feed into and then finalize) but the logic is essentially that APIs should be "good enough" for the average user, not perfect. I think that's fine, but I'm also the one that wrote the hashing API so take it with a grain of salt. :-)