MarI/O was programmed in the Lua programming language.
“Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description.” (https://www.lua.org/about.html)
Facts about Lua:
- „Lua“ (pronounced LOO-ah) is the Portuguese word for „Moon“
- Lua was developed and is maintained by a team at PUC-Rio (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil)
- Many features like automatic memory management and dynamic typing make Lua ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
The main benefits of using Lua are the following:
- It is open-source (and therefore free)
- It barely takes any disk space (297 KB, compressed)
- It provides (meta-) mechanisms for implementing key concepts of different programming paradigms
- It can extend other programming languages (and vice versa)
- It runs on any kind of OS
- It is the fastest (interpreted scripting) language
- It has shown its potential in many industrial applications (e.g. Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom) and games (e.g. World of Warcraft)
But most importantly, the website slant.co ranked the Lua scripting language as the best scripting language for game development. This is the main reason why it will be used for this project. (cf. https://www.slant.co/versus/1418/110/~lua_vs_python)
