JavaScript vs. Lua vs. Scala vs. Swift 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.

Writing Swift code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and Swift includes modern features developers love. Swift code is safe by design and produces software that runs lightning-fast. Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages, combined with decades of experience building Apple platforms. Named parameters are expressed in a clean syntax that makes APIs in Swift even easier to read and maintain. Even better, you don’t even need to type semi-colons. Inferred types make code cleaner and less prone to mistakes, while modules eliminate headers and provide namespaces. To best support international languages and emoji, Strings are Unicode-correct and use a UTF-8 based encoding to optimize performance for a wide-variety of use cases. You can even write concurrent code with simple, built-in keywords that define asynchronous behavior, making your code more readable and less error-prone.