История изменений

Why Nelua?

Nelua is being developed by a Lua lover who, after years of using Lua in game projects, wished for a Lua-flavored, efficient, simple language that was powerful at compile time and could replace C/C++ code in game projects

Nelua was created with the intent to make an efficient compiled language with syntax similar to Lua. It is one of the few programmable statically typed languages that uses powerful compile-time metaprogramming capabilities to generate efficient code. Nelua is developed by a game developer who uses it to make games


A note for C users

Nelua tries to expose most of C’s features without overhead, so expect to get near-C performance when coding in the C style; that is, using type notations, manual memory management, pointers, and records (structs).

The semantics are not exactly the same as C semantics, but they are close. There are slight differences (like initializing to zero by default) to minimize undefined behaviors and other differences to maintain consistency with Lua semantics (like integer division rounding towards negative infinity). However, there are ways to use C semantics when needed.

The preprocessor is much more powerful than C’s preprocessor because it is part of the compiler which runs in Lua. This means you can interact with the compiler during parsing. The preprocessor should be used for code specialization, making generic code, and avoiding code duplication.

Nelua compiles everything into a single readable C file. If you know C, it is recommended that you read the generated C code to learn more about exactly how the compiler works and what code it outputs

Why Nelua?

Nelua is being developed by a Lua lover who, after years of using Lua in game projects, wished for a Lua-flavored, efficient, simple language that was powerful at compile time and could replace C/C++ code in game projects

Nelua was created with the intent to make an efficient compiled language with syntax similar to Lua. It is one of the few programmable statically typed languages that uses powerful compile-time metaprogramming capabilities to generate efficient code. Nelua is developed by a game developer who uses it to make games


A note for C users

Nelua tries to expose most of C’s features without overhead, so expect to get near-C performance when coding in the C style; that is, using type notations, manual memory management, pointers, and records (structs).

The semantics are not exactly the same as C semantics, but they are close. There are slight differences (like initializing to zero by default) to minimize undefined behaviors and other differences to maintain consistency with Lua semantics (like integer division rounding towards negative infinity). However, there are ways to use C semantics when needed.

The preprocessor is much more powerful than C’s preprocessor because it is part of the compiler which runs in Lua. This means you can interact with the compiler during parsing. The preprocessor should be used for code specialization, making generic code, and avoiding code duplication.

Nelua compiles everything into a single readable C file. If you know C, it is recommended that you read the generated C code to learn more about exactly how the compiler works and what code it outputs