MoonSharp / the future of Lua

[YoshiRulz]

(going to flesh this out more later the can has been kicked down the road now that Lua works under Mono)

(see existing discussion in #971 (comment), #1415, #1422, and #1491, and also in IRC logs if you have them)

options to choose from:

• Lua
  • (status quo) NLua w/ same API surface
  • MoonSharp w/ same API surface (fully managed, but it's still only up to Lua 5.2)
  • Pluto (fork of Lua 5.4, probably no C# bindings)
  • Roblox' Luau w/ same API surface (fork of Lua 5.1 with more or fewer features compared to Lua 5.4, notably no integers or stdlib io, also I doubt there are C# bindings)
  • some form of Lua w/ new API surface
• C#
  • Roslyn embedding is heavy but functional, case study: Space Engineers
• I'll make my own C#, with blackjack and hookers!
  • I've considered forking the Roslyn C# compiler to create a new .NET language, but C# is becoming increasingly like my vision with every update. So see above re: embedded C#.
• Kotlin
  • blocked by either: 1. Xamarin merger finally adding JVM compat to .NET 8+ (and then us moving to .NET 8+), or
  • 2. Kotlin compiler getting an MSIL target (unlikely)
• Python (see Python support? #1243)
  • Python.NET (working, see ext. tools wiki)
  • IronPython 3 (maybe dead?)
• IronRuby (dead)
• Rune
  • blocked by unfinished C FFI (only Rust hosts can spawn a Rune VM for now)

[YoshiRulz]

(reserved because I can imagine this thread getting real long)

[CasualPokePlayer]

• Pluto (fork of Lua 5.4, probably no C# bindings)

It would appear the API (as far as bindings are concerned) is identical to Lua 5.4, so simply dropping in a different .dll/.so would suffice to "support" this (hell you could make it literally a switch in the config whether you want Pluto or pure Lua 5.4)