Fengari

After @Offray’s pointer to fengari, I found this interesting page of examples: Made with Remarkable!

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It’s quite nice to see a fairly complete implementation of Lua for the web. Lua is a much simpler and more approachable language than modern JavaScript, so it’s great to see a strong pathway for using that in the browser. :slightly_smiling_face:

@akkartik, is there any chance it provides a pathway for your LÖVE-based programs to appear on the web as well? I guess there are efforts like love.js already, but they seem to use Emscripten, so perhaps Fengari offers a nicer route (depending on whether it assists with graphics APIs). Browsers make some things more difficult though, especially saving state as recently discussed with TiddlyWiki, so perhaps you’re not that interested in deploying to the web.

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Yeah, love.js and emscripten have felt fairly heavyweight, whereas fengari feels more in the Lua “spirit”. So I don’t particularly care that it doesn’t support the LÖVE APIs. That stuff is easy to port.

I’ve historically not cared about deploying to the web when the suggestion comes from drive-by commenters. Yes it might get some adoption, but it also seemed harder to differentiate from existing Javascript projects. However, when someone says the existing stuff on the web isn’t good enough for reasons that seem more aligned with my values, and there’s a substantive commitment to use something, and they’ve gone to the trouble of researching alternatives and uncovering a nice platform like fengari – then my ears perk up.

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