Welcome to LuaConsole Website

Copyright information: LuaConsole License - Lua License - LuaJIT License

About

The project came to life when I realized how bad the PUC-Lua and LuaJIT’s REPL interpreters were. I took action and started development on a brand new REPL interpreter around May 1, 2017. The project came out a massive success!

LuaConsole is a Cross-Platform CLI application designed to support Lua-5.1.x, Lua-5.2.x, Lua-5.3.x, Lua-5.4.x, and LuaJIT-2.0 while not breaking compatibility, but also adding some very QOL features. The at-birth goal for LuaConsole was to be better than PUC-Lua in terms of pretty code, more operation, and less ‘bugs’. Soon after, I took a look at LuaJIT and reworked it… after exporting some functions to learn (and fix) them aka jitsupport.c. One other step was luaadd.dll which added a few debug things such as stack_dump() and mainly just current directory and terminal clearing, but was later scrapped because it made the repo too complex. It is in a perfect place to support Lua-5.0 and earlier.

Collaborators (2)

• tilkinsc
• DarkWiiPlayer

Getting Started

Simply run prereqs followed by your build script!

---

Things wrong with PUC-Lua REPL interpreter (2/26/2021):

• Poor formatted command line help message
• Mashed up, not spaced properly, weird tabs, string-line cutting aka column 80, etc
• Code was horrifying to look at and hard to follow through, very complex names, functions not ordered
• It was a maintainers nightmare
• Redundant code, you don’t need to pass args to pmain, even luajit doesn’t do that
• Full help/usage not layed out. [options] means a lot for ordering, which had unexpected behaviour…
• Lack of support for different versions of switches (-, /) aka windows vs linux switches
• Parameters couldn’t be combined, thanks [options] (can’t lua -e "print(arg[1], arg[2])" arg1 arg2)
• Readline library is actually only useful for those who knew what they were doing, use stdin instead
• Bulk was not features: When the line numbers matched between LuaConsole and PUC-Lua, LuaConsole had much more functionality and full support lua51, lua52, and lua53 (can’t remember if jit too, prob not)
• There was too much pushing to the stack for no reason when you could just preprocess the information or something
• PUC-Lua hasn’t updated their console much since 2003 lua5.0
• No features are likely in development
• luajit only conforms with changes to PUC-Lua 5.1 REPL with minimal upstream support
• PUC-Lua easily deprecated in favor for LuaJIT variation: fast, the addition of -j, -O, and -b
• I found it hard to use stdout when parsing things with lua because the copyright
• No support for -Dglobal=value variables (i.e. dynamic environments)
• Working directory support == NULL, probably need io package revamped tbh
• -l worked, but never before -e so you can use it. l before e except in LC.
• You didn’t know where to put the -l, nor when it executed
• (Opinion) Multi-line support was bad? and unused
  1. Nobody was really aware, esp how to use
  2. One liners in REPL are perfectly do-able, else just lua - | and type your stuff
  3. CLIs don’t support multiline to far extents outside of terminals
  4. Why not just create a file on the fly so you can edit it and not clunkily span through the lines of code, you know echo "whatever" > out.lua && type out.lua | luaw -p - or even just echo "Whatever" | luaw -p -
  5. Don’t type stories anyways because you WILL have a syntax error, idk the quality of the multiline history readline has
• Non-comprehensive error reporting
  1. Lua error message without traceback
  2. No ability to tell if your stack is being popped correctly
  3. Syntax versus Runtime errors not obvious
  4. Non-string non-userdata error returns not fully supported

Things wrong with LuaJIT REPL interpreter (9/13/2019):

• All problems from PUC-Lua REPL interpreter persisted
• Code derived still very messy
• Lack of proactive improvement/maintenance (conformence)
  1. No features are likely in development
• Bug with print_jit_status where things were left pushed to stack still not fixed (see link above)
• Weird usage of macro with LJ_TARGET_CONSOLE (as if it built as no-REPL)
• Needless single-use functions which aren’t in-lined
• Defines lacked () guards
• Preprocessed everything it needed in pmain instead of main
• Forces you to install rather than migrate binaries
• Weird binary names

Improvements made (2/26/2021):

• Attempts at a really good help message
• Supports all types of switches -,/ but only –help for –
• 100% fresh, maintainable code with proper names and ordering for forkers
• No external libraries needed thus far, but requests for readline and gettext have been made
• Attempt at relieving bulk useless code, 18% code coverage :D, see travis and codecov
• Command line arguments work as expected with arguments getting their chance to work
• Supports Lua-5.1.x, Lua-5.2.x, Lua-5.3.x and LuaJIT-2.0
• Supersedes use-ability of PUC-Lua and LuaJIT
• Full support for shared lua .so/.dll/.lua libraries with -L switch
• No multi-line support? Maybe I need a vim clone :P
• Fixed bugs in print_jit_status
• Attempts to conform to LuaJIT and PUC-Lua but not enforce standards with features
• Proper defines with () guards
• All preprocessing goes in main instead of lua-functions, smaller size, less needless complexity
• Supports Windows, Linux/headless, and Mac (unix compatible afaik)
• Use -D to define global variables, which transverses tables
• Working directory support
• Gracefully exits… most of the time… it’s really user-dependent if you exit or not
• LuaRocks and LuaDist can be used
• Proper signal (CTRL-C) support
• Ability to squelch copyright so you can do luaw -c -e "print(1, 2, 3)" and collect the stdout
• Determine how you handle parameters with -t
• Installation doesn’t have to be in a specific directory, so AIO workspaces are enabled
• Ability to switch lua version with executable call luaw -w lua-5.3.5 -e 'print(":)")'
• Basic translations are being added