I’m attending GopherCon in New York City this week. I will be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday August 27 based on my blog post about writing a Lua interpreter in Go. If you’re going to be there, come and say hi! For accessibility, I’m publishing the slides ahead of time and including a full transcript of the talk. I’ll update this post to include the recording once it becomes available.

I recently needed to build a custom Lua interpreter in Go. The exact reasons aren’t important for this blog post, but neither the reference implementation — which I will be referring to as “PUC‑Rio Lua” — nor the other open source Go Lua intepreters I could find were a good fit for my needs. Building a Lua interpreter ended up being a rather enjoyable months-long side quest. I’ve had a number of folks ask me to write about the experience since these sorts of projects usually highlight interesting aspects of both the implementation language and the interpreted language. So here we are!