lua-cli

The command-line interpreter for lua-rs, a Lua 5.4 implementation written in safe Rust. The crate is lua-cli; the binary it installs is lua-rs.

cargo install lua-cli
lua-rs -e 'print(("safe rust"):upper())'   # SAFE RUST

Usage

lua-rs                          # REPL
lua-rs script.lua               # run a file
lua-rs -e 'print(1 + 2)'        # run a one-liner
echo 'print("hi")' | lua-rs -   # read from stdin
lua-rs -v                       # version

It mirrors the standard lua CLI: a bare argument is a script filename, -e runs a chunk, - reads from stdin, and no arguments on a terminal starts the REPL.

What it is

A from-scratch reimplementation of PUC-Rio Lua 5.4.7 (lexer, parser, bytecode compiler, register VM, garbage collector, coroutines, standard library) with no C dependency. It runs the unmodified upstream Lua 5.4.7 test suite against the binary and passes 44/44, and it runs the stock LuaRocks 3.11.1 client for pure-Lua rocks. It is competitive with reference C (about 1.3x geomean wall time), not faster, and is not LuaJIT.

To embed Lua in a Rust program instead of running it from the shell, use lua-rs-runtime.

Full documentation, benchmarks, and source: github.com/ianm199/lua-rs.

License

A port of Lua (Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, PUC-Rio). Lua and this port are both MIT-licensed.