kyren/piccolo

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2148 stars · 101 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Piccolo is an experimental stackless Lua interpreter implemented in pure Rust, designed to safely run and sandbox untrusted Lua scripts. It emphasizes memory safety, DoS resilience, and safe Rust-to-Lua API bindings.

Use cases

• run untrusted Lua scripts safely in a Rust application
• embed a Lua interpreter in Rust with safe bindings
• sandbox scripts with bounded execution time and memory
• interpret Lua code without a C dependency
• bind Rust APIs to Lua user types that survive garbage collection

When to choose

• you need to execute untrusted Lua scripts with strong sandboxing guarantees
• you want a pure-Rust Lua interpreter with no C dependencies
• you need safe, GC-aware Rust/Lua bindings

When to avoid

• you need full PUC-Rio Lua compatibility or performance
• you need a stable, production-ready API (pre-1.0 with frequent breakage)
• you need protection against side-channel attacks

Facets

library · maturity experimental

interpreter programming-language programming-languages developer-tools security rust cross-platform lua-vm stackless sandboxing scripting garbage-collection sandbox

Member repositories

For agents

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