Shopify/go-lua

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

3451 stars · 213 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

go-lua is a port of the Lua 5.2 virtual machine and compiler to pure Go, provided as a Go library for embedding Lua scripting into Go applications. It is compatible with binary files produced by the reference Lua `luac` and is used in production at Shopify.

Use cases

• embed a Lua scripting engine in a Go application
• run Lua scripts from Go code
• let users customize Go tool behavior with Lua scripts
• execute Lua bytecode compiled with luac
• script load generation or resiliency tooling flows

When to choose

• you want Lua scripting in Go without cgo or C dependencies
• you need compatibility with Lua 5.2 bytecode from luac
• you want a simple, pure-Go library API rather than a standalone interpreter binary

When to avoid

• you need coroutines, Lua pattern matching (regex), or string.dump, which are not implemented
• you need weak reference tables
• you need maximum interpreter performance - C Lua is ~6x faster and gopher-lua is ~20% faster
• you want a command-line Lua interpreter - this is a library only

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

interpreter parser sdk programming-languages parsers developer-tools go cross-platform lua-vm scripting pure-go lua-5-2 embedding automation

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="Shopify/go-lua")