Component Pascal vs. Lua vs. Python vs. Ruby Comparison Chart

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 has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.

Wondering why Ruby is so popular? Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. And yet, they say it’s handy and practical. Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity. Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups. Ruby is ranked among the top 10 on most of the indices that measure the growth and popularity of programming languages worldwide (such as the TIOBE index). Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework.