I'm currently working on a macOS app that's built with Racket and allows the user to write small scripts to process and filter some data. While Racket is definitely my preferred language and I could easily use it for these scripts, my target audience for this app would probably appreciate a more familiar language. I decided to use Lua. So, last weekend I was faced with a choice1 between writing FFI bindings for Lua or implementing a #lang in Racket. Of course, I picked the harder option. Partly because it seemed like the more fun option, and partly because this way I don't have to worry about making two (three? did I mention Swift's also in the mix?) very different runtimes cooperate.
It's pretty far along at this point, though some Lua standard library
functionality is still missing and a couple things are still missing
lexer support (long brackets, scientific notation for numbers). If you
want to play around with it, you can get it from the package server
by installing lua-lang or lua-lib if you don't want the docs.
You can find the code on GitHub and the docs on the package
server.
Before I started working on the #lang, I had checked the documentation server to see if there was already an implementation. I didn't find anything. Unfortunately, I forgot to check the package server until I was ready to upload my own library. Long story short, there are now (at least) two2 independent implementations of Lua as a #lang for Racket. Whoops. ↩