Open Source Lua Programming Languages for Linux

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua is designed, implemented, and maintained by a team at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua was born and raised in Tecgraf, formerly the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio. Lua is now housed at LabLua, a laboratory of the Department of Computer Science of PUC-Rio.

Agena is an easy-to-learn procedural programming language suited to be used in scientific, mathematical, scripting, networking, and many other applications. Binaries are available for Solaris, Windows, Linux, OS/2, Mac OS X, Raspberry Pi and DOS.

Fennel is a programming language that brings together the speed, simplicity and reach of Lua with the flexibility of a lisp syntax and macro system. Full Lua compatibility: Easily call any Lua function or library from Fennel and vice-versa. Zero overhead: Compiled code should be just as efficient as hand-written Lua. Compile-time macros: Ship compiled code with no runtime dependency on Fennel. Embeddable: Fennel is a one-file library as well as an executable. Embed it in other programs to support runtime extensibility and interactive development. Anywhere you can run Lua code, you can run Fennel code. Fennel is a lisp that compiles to Lua. It aims to be easy to use, expressive and has almost zero overhead compared to writing Lua directly. Building Fennel from source allows you to use versions of Fennel that haven't been released, and it makes contributing to Fennel easier.

MoonScript is a dynamic scripting language that compiles into Lua. It gives you the power of one of the fastest scripting languages combined with a rich set of features. MoonScript can either be compiled into Lua and run at a later time, or it can be dynamically compiled and run using the moonloader. It’s as simple as requiring "moonscript" in order to have Lua understand how to load and run any MoonScript file. Because it compiles right into Lua code, it is completely compatible with alternative Lua implementations like LuaJIT, and it is also compatible with all existing Lua code and libraries. The command line tools also let you run MoonScript directly from the command line, like any first-class scripting language.