Motivation
Around 2006, Roblox started using Lua 5.1 as a scripting language for games. Over the years we ended up substantially evolving the implementation and the language; to support growing sophistication of games on the Roblox platform, growing team sizes and large internal teams writing a lot of code for application/editor (1+MLOC as of 2020), we had to invest in performance, ease of use and language tooling, and introduce a gradual type system to the language. More…
Sandboxing
Luau limits the set of standard libraries exposed to the users and implements extra sandboxing features to be able to run unprivileged code (written by our game developers) side by side with privileged code (written by us). This results in an execution environment that is different from what is commonplace in Lua. More…
Compatibility
Whenever possible, Luau aims to be backwards-compatible with Lua 5.1 and at the same time to incorporate features from later revisions of Lua. However, Luau is not a full superset of later versions of Lua - we do not always agree with Lua design decisions, and have different use cases and constraints. All post-5.1 Lua features, along with their support status in Luau, are documented here.
Syntax
Luau is syntactically backwards-compatible with Lua 5.1 (code that is valid Lua 5.1 is also valid Luau); however, we have extended the language with a set of syntactical features that make the language more familiar and ergonomic. The syntax is described here.
Analysis
To make it easier to write correct code, Luau comes with a set of analysis tools that can surface common mistakes. These consist of a linter and a type checker, colloquially known as script analysis, and are integrated into luau-analyze command line executable. The linting passes are described here, and the type checking user guide can be found here.
Performance
In addition to a completely custom front end that implements parsing, linting and type checking, Luau runtime features new bytecode, interpreter and compiler that are heavily tuned for performance. Luau currently does not implement Just-In-Time compilation, but its interpreter can be competitive with LuaJIT interpreter depending on the program. We continue to optimize the runtime and rewrite portions of it to be even more efficient. While our overall goal is to minimize the amount of time programmers spend tuning performance, some details about the performance characteristics are provided for inquisitive minds.
Libraries
As a language, Luau is a full superset of Lua 5.1. As far as standard library is concerned, some functions had to be removed from the builtin libraries, and some functions had to be added; refer to full documentation for details. When Luau is embedded into an application, the scripts normally get access to extra library features that are application-specific.