Simon Willison’s Weblog

Fullmoon (via) A “fast and minimalistic web framework” written in Lua, based on Redbean. The documentation for this is fantastic, and because it uses Redbean the development experience is to download the Redbean executable (which runs on every platform) and then drop your own Lua scripts into it using zip. # 18th February 2022, 6:41 pm

redbean (via) “redbean makes it possible to share web applications that run offline as a single-file αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε zip archive which contains your assets. All you need to do is download the redbean.com program below, change the filename to .zip, add your content in a zip editing tool, and then change the extension back to .com”.

redbean is implemented as a single C file with a dazzling array of clever tricks—most impressively, the single executable works on Linux, macOS, Windows and various BSDs!

It embeds Lua, and in June last year added SQLite too—so self-contained distributable web applications built with Redbean can now use Lua and SQLite for dynamic scripting. Performance sounds incredible: “redbean can serve 1 million+ gzip encoded responses per second on a cheap personal computer”. # 17th February 2022, 6:01 am

Writing a minimal Lua implementation with a virtual machine from scratch in Rust. Phil Eaton implements a subset of Lua in a Rust in this detailed tutorial. # 15th January 2022, 6:29 pm

Mozilla Telemetry: In-depth Data Pipeline (via) Detailed behind-the-scenes look at an extremely sophisticated big data telemetry processing system built using open source tools. Some of this is unsurprising (S3 for storage, Spark and Kafka for streams) but the details are fascinating. They use a custom nginx module for the ingestion endpoint and have a “tee” server written in Lua and OpenResty which lets them route some traffic to alternative backend. # 12th April 2018, 3:44 pm

Object models (via) Extremely comprehensive and readable discussion of the object models of Python, JavaScript, Lua and Perl 5. I learned something new about every one of those languages. # 29th November 2017, 2:59 pm

Nmap 5.00 Release Notes. Released today, “the most important Nmap release since 1997”. New features include Ncat, a powerful netcat alternative, Ndiff, a utility for comparing scan results so you can spot changes to your network, and a new Nmap Scripting Engine using Lua. # 16th July 2009, 7:40 pm

Tokyo Cabinet: Beyond Key-Value Store. Useful overview of Yet Another Scalable Key Value Store. Interesting points: multiple backends (hash table, B-Tree, in memory, on disk), a “table” engine which enables more advanced queries, a network server that supports HTTP, memcached or its own binary protocol and the ability to extend the engine with Lua scripts. # 14th February 2009, 11:17 am

why’s potion. why’s latest project is a small, fast language (JIT to x86/x86-64) which seems to take ideas from Ruby, Lua, Python and who knows where else. Everything is based around objects, closures and mixins, with the delightful inclusion of scoped mixins so you can modify an object only within a certain module (hence avoiding Ruby’s action-at-a-distance problems). # 8th January 2009, 6:37 pm

mod_magnet (via) lighttpd module that will be included by default in version 1.5—it lets you write Lua scripts that can hook in to any phase of the request, including URL rewriting and content generation. # 6th April 2007, 10:12 pm