Macro
The Lua Architecture
Advanced Topics in Software Engineering
Mark Stroetzel Glasberg Jim Bresler Yongmin 'Kevin ' Cho
Introduction
Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed to extend applications. Lua started as a small language with modest goals. The language has grown incrementally. As a result, Lua has been re-architected and rewritten several times in the past ten years. The original functional requirements and motivation of the architecture were documented in the paper “Lua-an extensible extension language” [1]. A few other versions of the language were briefly described in “The Evolution of an Extension Language: A History of Lua” [3]. The architecture and implementation was created and is maintained by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo at the Computer Graphics Technology Group of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil (PUC-Rio). Lua’s implementation consists of a small library of ANSI C functions that compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and the ability to run on small devices with limited capabilities. These implementation goals resulted is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems. This paper reconstructs and documents the architecture of Lua version 5.0.2. Lua 5.0.2 contains approximately 25,000 lines of source code. The code base uses an instance of the compiler reference model, has several identifiable patterns, and is divided into clearly defined modules such as the code interpreter, parser and virtual machine. The language is being used in several projects at Tecgraf, PUC-Rio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in several industry companies such as Microsoft, LucasArts Entertainment, and others.
Architectural Requirements
Lua’s main quality attributes, which are simplicity, performance, flexibility, and portability, were driven by the
Advanced Topics in Software Engineering
Mark Stroetzel Glasberg Jim Bresler Yongmin 'Kevin ' Cho
Introduction
Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed to extend applications. Lua started as a small language with modest goals. The language has grown incrementally. As a result, Lua has been re-architected and rewritten several times in the past ten years. The original functional requirements and motivation of the architecture were documented in the paper “Lua-an extensible extension language” [1]. A few other versions of the language were briefly described in “The Evolution of an Extension Language: A History of Lua” [3]. The architecture and implementation was created and is maintained by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo at the Computer Graphics Technology Group of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil (PUC-Rio). Lua’s implementation consists of a small library of ANSI C functions that compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and the ability to run on small devices with limited capabilities. These implementation goals resulted is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems. This paper reconstructs and documents the architecture of Lua version 5.0.2. Lua 5.0.2 contains approximately 25,000 lines of source code. The code base uses an instance of the compiler reference model, has several identifiable patterns, and is divided into clearly defined modules such as the code interpreter, parser and virtual machine. The language is being used in several projects at Tecgraf, PUC-Rio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in several industry companies such as Microsoft, LucasArts Entertainment, and others.
Architectural Requirements
Lua’s main quality attributes, which are simplicity, performance, flexibility, and portability, were driven by the
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