BoxLang vs. Java vs. Lua vs. Wolfram Mathematica Comparison Chart

BoxLang is a modern, dynamically and loosely typed scripting language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that supports Object-Oriented (OO) and Functional Programming (FP) constructs. It can be deployed on multiple platforms and all operating systems, web servers, Java application servers, AWS Lambda, WebAssembly, and more. BoxLang combines many features from different programming languages to provide developers with a modern, fluent, and expressive syntax. BoxLang has been designed to be a highly modular and dynamic language that takes advantage of all the modern features of the JVM. It is dynamically typed, which means there's no need to declare types. It can perform type inference, auto-casting, and promotions between different types. The language adjusts to its deployed runtime and can add, remove, or modify methods and properties at runtime.

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.