Lua - a toy or a full-fledged language?

Question

Programming

Hey!
I'm not a programmer, but I want to develop toys and apps for the iPhone. Tried to understand Objective C, just C, C++. All of them seemed terribly complicated, with a bunch of unnecessary introductory (in my narrow-minded opinion, do not take it to heart). A couple of days ago I stumbled upon the Corona SDK and fell in love with how simple everything is. After watching three lessons, I was able to write a simple program that displays the intended composition on the screen from layers of graphics and text. As I understand it, this is the merit of the lua language.
Actually the question is: how serious is this language and Corona SDK to produce full-fledged toys that work adequately on the iPhone? It is clear that its performance is lower than lower-level languages ​​(for example, native Objective C), but by how much?
Please respond only to those who have experience writing serious programs in lua.

Answer 1

I use Corona SDK - the product is very good, use it - you won't regret it. Many high-quality applications have already been made.
Advanced features, of course, are not enough, but not everyone needs them. The team is actively developing the SDK every day, responding to bug reports and feature requests. Friendly community.
Moai SDK alternative.

Answer 2

Official language. Very convenient work with tables, which is logical, because he grew out of this. A very good tool for shoveling data. Plus, the language itself is quite modern - functional style, closures - everything is there. The standard library is poor, but this is also quite logical, usually the language is used as an additional scripting language.

Answer 3

IMHO
You can check the engine (in order of priority):
1) See what has already really come out and is available in the AppStore
2) Write a prototype of your game on it (which you did)
3) Climb the forums and see the amount of negative (namely negative)
Minor engine criteria:
* How popular the engine is and how difficult it is to find specialists to work with it
* Price
* How long do you plan to use this engine (for one project for several for life)
* Availability of paid and free plugins
* Community
PS Look also Unity (there C#)

Answer 4

RTS Spring ( springrts.com/ )
Uses LUA for widgets, gadgets, and particle systems.
Redis ( antirez.com/ )
Uses LUA for storage.
Since these amazing projects use LUA for some pretty important parts of themselves, then so can you.

Answer 5

> As I understand it, this is the merit of the lua language.
This is the merit of Corona. The language itself is primarily scripting, one of the best in this area.
As the main language, someone is tinkering with things (like github.com/ignacio/LuaNode ), but I suspect it's more of an experiment.
You can read more about luajit.

Answer 6

Okay, but still I advise you to join this channel, it helped me a lot to quickly get used to the SDK, and be aware of the latest trends.

Answer 7

By the way, the Lua language is used to create the so-called add-ons for World of Warcraft :)
I rewrote one add-on for myself from the new version of the game (votlk) to the old one (tbk) - it didn’t cause problems, despite the fact that I didn’t speak the language generally.