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According to lua.org:

  Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.

This makes Lua ideal for configuration and extensions of other programs, also because of its great interoperation with C. The basic Lua interpreter is less than 250K in size. As the official implementation is written in ANSI C it is available for many platforms and architectures.

## Installation

There are multiple versions available:

- lua — Lua 5.4
- lua53 — Lua 5.3
- lua52 — Lua 5.2
- lua51 — Lua 5.1

## JIT compilation support

Just-in-time compilation is a method of compiling source code at run-time, rather than before. LuaJIT is a drop-in replacement for Lua 5.1. This version is best suited for higher performance constrains.

For JIT compilation support install the luajit package.

## Modules

The LuaRocks package manager is available as luarocks.

Some modules are also available in the official repositories.

## See also

- Lua reference manuals.

Category:

- Programming languages