Lua scripting - tsukinoko-kun/papermc-web-api GitHub Wiki

What is Lua?

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

Why choose Lua?

Lua is a proven, robust language

Lua has been used in many industrial applications (e.g., Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom), with an emphasis on embedded systems (e.g., the Ginga middleware for digital TV in Brazil) and games (e.g., World of Warcraft and Angry Birds). Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games. Lua has a solid reference manual and there are several books about it. Several versions of Lua have been released and used in real applications since its creation in 1993. Lua featured in HOPL III, the Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference, in 2007. Lua won the Front Line Award 2011 from the Game Developers Magazine.

Lua is fast

Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.

Lua is powerful (but simple)

A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways.

Lua is free

Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license). It may be used for any purpose, including commercial purposes, at absolutely no cost. Just download it and use it.

Paper API

Some functionality of the Paper API is available using the Paper global.

The entry point is ./plugins/papermc-web-api/lua/init.lua. From the same directory, you can require other Lua files.

Read about the available API here. If there is something missing, create an issue or pull request.

This plugin uses the LuaJ implementation.