this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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... Ok, that is legitimately impressive, from a technical standpoint.
Lua is a high level, not exactly very 'fast', very performant language. It is designed to be very, very human readable, and coding noob friendly.
Getting a 3D physics engine to work ... in lua... is not something I would have thought possible.
Usually you need to use a much lower level language to ... actually do that.
EDIT:
A few other commenters have now pointed out that this is actually using LuaJIT... which passes Lua code to a C compiler, quickly translates and then compiles in C, and then runs in C.
So, that makes much more sense, its functionally running in C, a lower level, compiled code language.
Still impressive nonetheless!
Lua is pretty fast actually, though I don't know how it compares to compiled speed.
I haven't benchmarked anything in a while, so it is possible Lua is more performant now than it once was... but in my (out of date) experience, python is faster than Lua, and nearly every language that is actually compiled is... one or two or three orders of magnitude faster.
Though it is also worth mentioning that Lua is fairly simple to plug in to some kind of database language, which can result in reasonably good performance in situations involving say... dynamically spawning or unspawning tons of inventory style minor items, or containers with them.
Lua has been fast enough to handle a simple 2D physics engine... but this is the first time I am hearing of it handling 3D.
At the dawn of mankind's perversion Lua was used for 3D