mlua

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2844 stars · 212 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

mlua is a Rust library providing safe, high-level bindings to Lua 5.5/5.4/5.3/5.2/5.1 (including LuaJIT) and Luau, with async/await support and the ability to write native Lua modules in Rust. It began as a fork of rlua and supports Windows, macOS, Linux, and WebAssembly targets.

Use cases

• embed a Lua scripting engine in a Rust application
• write native Lua modules in Rust
• run async Rust code from Lua scripts
• support multiple Lua versions including LuaJIT and Luau
• serialize Rust data structures to and from Lua with serde
• compile Lua bindings to WebAssembly

When to choose

• you need safe, idiomatic Rust bindings to Lua with a high-level API
• you need to support many Lua versions or LuaJIT/Luau from one library
• you want async/await integration between Rust and Lua
• you want to build loadable Lua modules in Rust

When to avoid

• you need bindings for a language other than Rust
• you want a full Lua interpreter as a standalone executable rather than an embeddable library
• you need zero C dependency and pure-Rust Lua implementation

Facets

library · maturity active

programming-language interpreter sdk serialization concurrency programming-languages developer-tools cross-platform rust windows wasm cross-platform lua-bindings luajit luau scripting async-await ffi native-modules linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mlua-rs/mlua")