from Hacker News

Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter

by Bogdanp on 6/26/25, 5:28 AM with 24 comments

• by williamdclt on 6/29/25, 6:04 PM

  Well done, writing interpreters is fun!

  I’m not really sold on why Go would be a particularly good fit for the task, compared to other languages. Seems to be mostly “interfaces are useful for interpreters, and GC means I don’t have to care about memory management” - both of which are true but hardly specific to Go. There’s some form of interface in almost every mainstream language, I think the implementation would be pretty much the same in any GCd language

• by ufo on 6/29/25, 5:22 PM

  I know the author starts the post by saying he won't explain the reasons why he had to write a new Lua interpreter from scratch, but I'm still curious about that. Does anyone know? I dug through some of the links in the post and couldn't find the answer.

• by wavemode on 6/29/25, 6:41 PM

  I'm surprised there was no mention of implementing Lua's coroutines via Go's goroutines.

• by anaempromptu on 6/29/25, 8:29 PM

  tfw you learn lua so you can build robots on minecraft

• by jekwoooooe on 6/29/25, 6:00 PM

  Go rocks for pretty much everything

• by andrewmcwatters on 6/29/25, 8:19 PM

  Not that it's terribly important, but in the Lua circles, the reference implementation is usually referred to as PUC-Rio Lua.

• by photochemsyn on 6/29/25, 10:07 PM

  Is it just me or is Go/Rust proseltyzing on HN kind of getting ridiculous?