leafo/moonscript

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

3461 stars · 199 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

MoonScript is a programmer-friendly dynamic scripting language with significant whitespace, classes, and comprehensions that compiles to Lua 5.1+ and LuaJIT. It ships as a self-hosted compiler with CLI tools, a moonloader for runtime compilation, and a native C parser generated from a pgen grammar.

Use cases

• write Lua code with cleaner syntax
• compile a language to Lua
• use classes and inheritance in Lua
• run MoonScript files directly from the command line
• dynamically load and compile MoonScript at runtime with moonloader
• target LuaJIT with a friendlier language

When to choose

• you want a cleaner, whitespace-significant syntax on top of Lua
• you need full compatibility with existing Lua libraries and LuaJIT
• you're building Lapis web apps or games on the Lua ecosystem

When to avoid

• you need plain Lua output you can hand-edit and maintain
• your team only knows Lua and won't learn a new language
• you need a language with active, frequent development

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

compiler parser programming-language cli programming-languages compilers parsers developer-tools lua cpp windows cli transpiler moonscript lua significant-whitespace self-hosted luajit-compatible pgen command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="leafo/moonscript")