My gut feeling comparing the two is that mRuby is a better (or at least less “quirky”) language, but Lua has a better (more robust) implementation. I don’t know how the two compare in terms of performance or “lightweight-ness”.
Lua definitely seems to be more widely-used, at least outside Japan.
IIrc, Matz designed Ruby as a pet passion project, and its design was reactionary against excessiveness found in other languages, hence its minimalism in arguably excessive syntax and notation. Otoh, Tegcraf designed Lua out of pure necessity, adding only the features needed to satisfy its clients' needs.
In my opinion, necessity always leads to the better product than desire, hence C is still unbeat, having been formed under similar circumstances. Lua's C API is copied by nearly every other embeddable scripting language, including (I think) mruby. Yet they were the first to come up with it, a testament to their creativity under pressure.
Ruby (and mruby) takes the Smalltalk approach, and asks, what if everything was an object and every function call is a method call? Lua takes a less extreme approach, and merely asks, what if every data structure was built on a hashmap?
Other than that, Lua takes a very minimal approach, having break/goto but not continue, if/elseif but not switch, metamethods but not inheritance. It gets to 90% of the functionality of JavaScript with 10% of the spec and 1% of the code. You can read the entire Lua manual in one Saturday. You can read its grammar in under five minutes.
For all its cleverness, and as a price for its concise implementation and design, Lua is inconvenient to use. Hence the plethora of languages that compile to Lua and try to make it more convenient to use. One comes to mind but I can't remember or google the name successfully.
/* mrb_gc_protect() leaves the object in the arena */
MRB_API void mrb_gc_protect(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
/* mrb_gc_register() keeps the object from GC. */
MRB_API void mrb_gc_register(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
/* mrb_gc_unregister() removes the object from GC root. */
MRB_API void mrb_gc_unregister(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
Semantically: Conflation of arrays and maps, conflation of `nil` and empty (both in tables and in function arguments), and the perennially-unpopular 1-based indexing.
mruby was created in 2012.
I have only two gripes with regard to mruby.
1) The primary users are C hackers. That's ok, but it means it also leaves out many other people. (Lua has the same problem of course.)
2) Documentation. This is something that really plagues about 90% of ruby projects. And it's not getting any better. It is as if in ruby, only 10% care about documentation - at best. Look at rack, opal, wasm for ruby - the documentation is TOTAL TRASH. Non-existing; look at rack. What a joke.
Now that ruby is following perl in its extinction path (sorry, the numbers are hard and real, there is no way to deny it), the ruby community should instead try to reverse that trend. Instead you see mega-corporations such as shopify pwning the remaining ecosystem and cannibalizing on it or people such as DHH rant about how Europe is collapsing (what the actual ... https://world.hey.com/dhh/europe-is-weak-and-delusional-but-... - we need an alternative to rails, how can anyone still work with DHH? Lo and behold, another shopify guy. The message is so clear for everyone to see now). None of this will of course revitalize ruby. Without an active AND actively growing community, ruby is set to die. I say this as someone who still uses ruby daily; I am tired of the "rumours of ruby dying are exaggerated". Yes, the rumours are exaggerated - but they are not rumours. The numbers are solid. TIOBE alone, with its 10000 faults, shows this trend clearly.
If our competitors voluntarily choose to use tools that are demonstrably less productive, that's great news for us.
So yes: Ruby is totally dead. No question. Without a doubt.
Sure the project just can’t be as mature as Rails but it deserves a look and we need to get behind projects like this if we do indeed want to see Rails alternatives flourish and grow.
Yeah, I think the Ruby world burned out of the whole "make everything nice" aesthetic when they alienated the everloving fuck out of _why. Now it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland where if you want nice things, you better be prepared to become a right expert because you will have no one to turn to when it breaks. I don't mind, I don't make money coding anymore and the challenge makes me feel alive again.
If I ever get to the point to where I gotta learn the C API, I'll do it through mruby. But it'll be a much easier path to systems work to interop with Rust instead.
The lack of documentation means that I'd just waste my time though. Not going to do that.
Also, I think mruby and MRI should not be separate. It doesn't do the project any good. It should be as modular as possible but one code base only.
Like not even close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiJC_v5Lus8 https://picoruby.org/
Mruby was a good attempt but I don't think they have become a competitive options.
When you normally want to ship apps which are written in Java, C#, python etc. you have to tell your users they have to download that runtime and your deps and how to start the runtime and which args to start your app from the command line.
With mruby you can just ship one file and everything is self contained.
April 2012 (55 comments, 174 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3866555
Frankly, I love Ruby as a language, but if it were as easy to embed as Lua I would have no reason to use Lua.
I'm sorry, first thing that came to mind.