Java vs. Lua vs. Nim vs. openIndiana 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.

OpenIndiana is an operating system from and for the illumos community, it branches from the UNIX-derived family tree, and as such it can sometimes seem quite complex. But with a little help and information, once you know the basics, you will find it actually has some of the nicest and friendliest tools around. As most Unix-derived operating system, it can be completely controlled via a Command Line Interface shell, but it also supports a windowing GUI system. From the CLI, it supports a number of different shells, the two main ones being ksh93 and Bash. It also supports the original SunOS SVR4 commands, the command and syntax famiilar to BSD users, and a large portion of the GNU userland commands that most Linux users are familiar with. You can select any or all of those different commands from your shell configuration, giving you the environment you are most happy with.