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Comment by leafo | Hacker News Reader

LuaJIT powers OpenResty[1] which powers my web framework Lapis[2] which powers my company itch.io[3]! (wow that's a mouthful)

Anyway, it's a stack I'm really happy to be using. Asynchronous IO without any code nesting. I wrote more about the benefits here: http://leafo.net/posts/itchio-and-coroutines.html

[1] https://openresty.org/en/

[2] http://leafo.net/lapis/

[3] https://itch.io/

I also made web server infrastructure for the Lua package manager LuaRocks in the same stack: https://luarocks.org Source is on github: https://github.com/luarocks/luarocks-site

Lua (especially with LuaJIT) is a great choice for web development.

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Love Lapis.

Question, since Lapis just transcode Moonscript into Lua to be used with OpenResty - why is Lapis so much slower than raw OpenResty/Lua?

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Because the lua code moonsript emits is inherently slower.

>> "inherently slower"

What's "inherent" in moonscript that makes it slower?

Not necessarily. Like CoffeeScript, it depends on what features you use.

Not really, the code mapping is very straightforward and generally has no performance degradation. There are some language constructs that are implemented in a way that can create anonymous functions in order to convert statements into expressions. Future versions of MoonScript can do a better job to eliminate those. If you're aware when they're generated you can avoid them by writing as you might do in Lua. Realistically though, the performance difference is negligible in comparison to all the other things that might happen in your average web request.

"slower" : I see Lapis is ahead of most frameworks, except platform or micro frameworks coded in C++, C or java. I think people should notice instead it's one of the fastest frameworks?

Did you compare Lapis to OpenResty in the benchmark above?

In case you're not aware Lapis = Moonscript + OpenResty.

And Moonsript is like Coffeescript but for Lua

Lapis ~= Moonscript + OpenResty, Lapis = OpenResty + loads of framework stuff to make development easier, as Leafo explained.

You can use Moonscript, but you can also use pure Lua.

Lapis is an entire web framework, OpenResty is a relatively low level interface to nginx. Lapis is an abstraction on top of OpenResty's Lua interface to make developing large web applications much more manageable.

It has nothing to do with MoonScript. MoonScript generates speedy code.

Any plans to focus on increasing Lapis performance to be closer to raw OpenResty?

Thanks for all your work Leaf. I use and recommend Lapis.

Is there something like uwsgi for Lua?

http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Lua.html

you also made moonscript and mustache.php. I imagine next you might rewrite nintendo from scratch in lua, and singlehandedly control the entire games industry.

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