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!
So from what I can read, the Morrowind Script Extender uses LuaJIT instead of regular lua, which does tracing just-in-time compilation. Meaning, and I'm just paraphrasing wikipeda here, it compiles frequently executed sequeneces of operations into machine code.
Now, that is a very relevant detail!
I did not know LuaJIT was even a thing.
Still probably not as performant as ... C++ or Rust or something, that is totally precompiled... but that would explain how this is even possible, a 3D Lua based physics engine.
Yeah, looks like LuaJIT passes a bunch of the Lua code into C, just good ole C, and then dynamically compiles it, then runs the 'translated' C code.
That makes a lot more sense lol.