Colony, an experimental JavaScript-to-Lua compiler

Hey all, I'm posting this to HN to see if there's any interest in a full-fledged JavaScript port to Lua. Colony right now is a proof-of-concept, but there might be a real use case out there for embeddable JavaScript where solutions like V8 would simply be too large.<p>Since it's a source-to-source compiler, you can use Colony generally wherever Lua source is required. For example, I was able to follow the beginners tutorials of the Corona SDK (<a href="http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/" rel="nofollow">http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/</a>, a cross-platform mobile SDK that uses Lua) by programming CoffeeScript instead, which was surprisingly fun.

Lua is a great language. I personally would rather go the other way and use Lua instead of JS in the browser.<p>This is cool though from a hacking perspective. Good work.

In which cases would anyone need:<p>- to write code in JS rather than in Lua;<p>- and run the result on a platform which supports Lua but not JS?<p>Except in a Dilbert-like situation, where a clueless middle manager decides that using a dirty hack is safer than letting JS programmers take the 2 days it would take them to become very proficient in Lua, I can't think of one.

The fun thing about transpilers is that you can chain them together. Waiting to see some C stuff ported to Lua using Emscripten via JS.

I remember google's dart that compiled to javascript which ran 7% as fast as hand-written javascript. I wonder what the performance for this will be compared to handwritten lua? I've tried wrapping everything into tables like this in lua, and there definitely is a performance penalty.<p>I guess programmers will always be programmers. "Ooo look, this year CPU speed has quadtripled! Let's make a compiler for X to Y which will reduce performance by only 75%; It means you can run it at the same speed as running hand-written Y last year!"<p>I'll cringe when I see someone creating a WoW addon using this.