from Hacker News

Ravi is a dialect of Lua, with JIT and AOT compilers

by InitEnabler on 3/18/24, 3:54 PM with 15 comments

• by uticus on 3/18/24, 9:32 PM

  Love it. Use case is difficult to grasp at first, but seems to be somewhere less powerful than LuaJIT, but with typing; and more powerful than Typed Lua, but with the same typing?

  > Lua is perfect as a small embeddable dynamic language so why a derivative? Ravi extends Lua with static typing for improved performance when JIT compilation is enabled.

  > There are other attempts to add static typing to Lua - e.g. Typed Lua but these efforts are mostly about adding static type checks in the language while leaving the VM unmodified.

  > Of course there is the fantastic LuaJIT implementation. Ravi has a different goal compared to LuaJIT. Ravi prioritizes ease of maintenance and support, language safety, and compatibility with Lua 5.3, over maximum performance.

• by vitiral on 3/19/24, 3:32 AM

  Love it but don't quite get it.

  Lua only has 5 "data" types: nil, bool, number, string, and table. There is also "userdata" (defined in C)

  Would this improve performance for functions that take in the non-table types? Or does it provide some mechanism for structured data besides tables?

  I have a hard time believing there are many performance gains to be had for the few functions that take in only native types. I suppose compiling those could have major performance improvements in a few tight-loop use-cases?

• by synergy20 on 3/18/24, 9:00 PM

  it's based off MIR, does it have something to do with https://mlir.llvm.org/ ?

  for typed lua, there is a newer typescript-alike effort https://github.com/teal-language/tl than the mentioned one at https://github.com/andremm/typedlua

• by ArkimPhiri on 3/18/24, 9:29 PM

  Ravi is interesting to work with. It's simplicity is was draws me the most.

• by logtempo on 3/19/24, 12:09 AM

  noob question from a hardware guy : what is a small embeddable dynamic language? What would be a user-case for example?