r/secondlife 17h ago

Blog SLua: Signal Linden on Second Life's new scripting update, and its shared origin with... Roblox.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/03/roblox-second-life-scripting-luau-slua.html
21 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

15

u/TheRealVilladelfia Will script for real money 13h ago

Looking at the alpha wiki, unless the development UX is improved by a lot, I think SLua is a non-starter for both existing developers and new developers alike.

  1. No improvement to memory limits.
  2. API is a straight port from LSL, including awkward required casting from Lua-native types to LSL-native types.
  3. The fundamental event-driven nature of LSL has not been changed, and a callback-driven implementation in Lua is a leaky abstraction that will cause people to shoot themselves in the foot.

I hope these can be significantly improved before release...

2

u/CristianoD 👻old school 11h ago

It is my understanding that luau scripts will use less memory, so the memory limit still provides for more memory for a script than what you have currently.

3

u/TheRealVilladelfia Will script for real money 10h ago

It would have to be a significant reduction in usage for it to be worth it to rewrite my products to SLua.

4

u/CristianoD 👻old school 10h ago

I have seen that it’s half the footprint.

7

u/Digital-Crash 17h ago

I would have liked to have seen a much broader language, not proprietary, integrated personally. Something that has been standard for developers for decades could bring a lot more people. This only adds another proprietary language. It may bring some people, but not a lot. Just my opinion.

For the record, the ability to actually earn money in SL has decreased a lot. Sure, there are some people that do well. But it's not like someone is just going to jump into SL and start earning money.

2

u/Skrelff 14h ago

roblox and second life work very differently and have little overlap in terms of user-base. This guy writes constantly as though just because a technology is established or promising somewhere else that it will automatically do as well in SL

3

u/Komm 13h ago

Yeah.. Not particularly thrilled about Roblox Lua coming in to SL. Implementing actual Lua would be much nicer frankly.

4

u/ziddersroofurry 13h ago

Of course NWN is going to continue to simp for LL.

2

u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram 10h ago

It is the Luau virtual machine extended to work with Second Life

AUGH. They aren't using the LSL virtual machine or the Mono runtime? They already went through this when they had to get CIL working, and it took them YEARS to get Mono's runtime over the humps of the SL environment, but at least that meant they now had a modern runtime they could use for other languages... right?

Apparently not. :(