I'm always fascinated by these decisions. Having only worked at smaller companies, I've never been involved in moving an entire stack away from the current/primary language. The feature backlog coming from the business never, ever, includes items like "change programming languages". It's always filled with customer or business facing features. And when faced with tough deadlines, as the adage goes, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.<p>I have worked on some legacy systems with languages like classic ASP and ColdFusion, and I would advocate against continuing to use them, only to ultimately be met with some feature request deadline. I know Roblox employs a ton of engineers (alright, more than a ton) but this decision couldn't have come lightly. How did this change come to be? Seems like it was a slow, organic, port of parts of their system over to Lua. What percentage of their engineering resources was spent working on this port, and will the gains made from switching to Lua outweigh the loss of productivity on the feature request backlog? Maybe they were blocked by JS and could only solve certain problems with Lua? Either way, this is very neat and makes me wonder what effect this will have on the job market, and if more large organizations going to follow suit and abandon JS in favor of Lua...
It is certainly an impressive feat, they all work and perform pretty well. They're doing this to dog food their own engine, mainly the UI side of it.<p>As far as I am aware all apps now use this instead of the native/web stacks they were using before, but its been a bit of a rocky transition.<p>Having used their website for years it just works and is pretty fast (However it is much slower in recent years than it once was), the new in-engine app just feels kinda clunky, its all incredibly slow and janky. Definitely not the smoothest of transitions
Wow this sounds like a big undertaking. They translated react 17 to lua and a bunch of other libs. This makes dog fooding more things possible but I don't see how for some of these...<p>I am interested in any tooling or AI they used to help automate this.<p>The most useful lua code that I've written was very basic openresty nginx scripting around SSL certificates