Terra - A low-level counterpart to Lua

[bbguimaraes]

I don't have much experience with lua (other than reading books, articles and code and fidling with some code), but isn't this an incredible thing, especially to game development?

http://terralang.org/

[Falco Girgis]

Officially spent all morning reading and researching Terra. What an amazing fucking idea and an amazing language. The guys at Standord who created this are total badasses. It JIT compiles into machine code and interoperates seamlessly with Lua and C.

The thing that I thought was the most orgasmic touch was using Lua to conditionally compile Terra. In essence, Terra is a clean, core, low-level language (analogous to C/++) with Lua as a pretty, high-level precompiler language (analogous to C macros and C++ templates, only a million times prettier).

The language also has vector data types with SIMD extensions, and I saw some code for using CUDA in the GitHub.

The only reason I'm not going to be using this in ES are the dependencies upon LuaJIT (which doesn't support every architecture we need) and LLVM/clang (which are going to be rather large runtime dependencies to do the compilation).

edit:

Additional literature for you scholarly types: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publi ... pldi13.pdf

[TheBuzzSaw]