The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

Anyway, that's all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.

[–] scrion@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I mean, Lua is a pretty "interesting" choice for that application, but don't blame shitty coding practices and inexperienced coders on the language.

The gigantic loop could have been cleaned up with a table, registering handlers for the individual cases.

Lua is probably not the best choice for a web service, but it definitely has its applications.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

There's a Lua module for Nginx, and in particular OpenResty bundles those two. Lua is snappy as hell, especially in the LuaJIT variant, and uses very little memory — so when it's paired with Nginx, one could probably run a performant web app on a toaster.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

Openresty and lapis are great for web services.

[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

That’s a pretty crazy use of Lua if I may say so.

It is possible to craft continue-like logic in lua, however, with (out of all things) goto statements.

For example, I have the following code in my dotfiles:

	for _, lang in pairs(loopvar) do
		if condition then
			goto continue
		end
		<do whatever the loop actually does>
		::continue::
	end

Of course the continue could be called anything. Really felt uncomfortable resorting to this way but it is possible :-)

[–] Droechai@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 4 days ago

I did my first game in BASIC with thousands of IF/ELSE when I was like 11, good to know that experience is directly transferable!