--- title: The Lua community needs to learn to move on « hisham.hm description: Hisham Muhammad, creator of htop and LuaRocks, argues that the Lua community has developed a paralyzing habit of supporting every Lua version simultaneously —... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on-hisham-hm-cmzudjrpo twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Lua community needs to learn to move on « hisham.hm | daily.dev og:description: Hisham Muhammad, creator of htop and LuaRocks, argues that the Lua community has developed a paralyzing habit of supporting every Lua version simultaneously —... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on-hisham-hm-cmzudjrpo og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/CmzudjrPO.png og:image:alt: The Lua community needs to learn to move on « hisham.hm og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Lua community needs to learn to move on « hisham.hm **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 4 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Hisham Muhammad, creator of htop and LuaRocks, argues that the Lua community has developed a paralyzing habit of supporting every Lua version simultaneously — from 5.1 through 5.5 and multiple LuaJIT variants — for over 20 years. He traces this to the Lua/LuaJIT schism around version 5.2, which led library authors to anchor on 5.1 for compatibility. He contends that since upstream maintainers (Roberto and Mike Pall) do EOL their interpreter versions, library authors should follow suit and stop supporting ancient versions. He also highlights his Teal language project as a tool that can help decouple library authors from the Lua 5.1 anchor by generating code for any target version. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 21 comments across lobsters (as of 2026-08-05). **TL;DR:** Commenters are divided: many agree that endlessly supporting ancient Lua versions is a burden, but several push back on the article's lack of concrete reasoning and point out legitimate real-world reasons (embedded environments, Neovim, TIC-80, LuaJIT) why the 5.1 anchor persists. **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 40% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Dropping support for decade-old versions is reasonable for unfunded open-source maintainers who can't sustain that workload. - Users who need old-version support have the source and modern AI tools to backport fixes themselves. - Moving toward supporting only the latest PUC-Rio Lua and latest LuaJIT would simplify the ecosystem. **The pushback** - The article offers little concrete reasoning or evidence for why moving on would actually improve things. - Many Lua deployments (TIC-80, Neovim, Redis) are legitimately locked to specific versions, making blanket version-dropping harmful to real users. - PUC-Rio itself contributes to fragmentation by breaking backward compatibility (e.g., removing math.atan2) without strong justification. - Neovim explicitly targets Lua 5.1 as a permanent interface, meaning a large volume of new code is still being written against it. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): Commenters broadly sympathize with maintainer fatigue but criticize the article for lacking concrete arguments and overlook legitimate ecosystem reasons — embedded runtimes, Neovim, LuaJIT — that keep the 5.1 anchor in place. **Hottest debate:** Whether real-world embedding constraints (Neovim, TIC-80, LuaJIT) justify continued 5.1 support or whether library authors should drop old versions regardless. **Open questions** - What concrete steps or migration tooling would actually make it feasible for the ecosystem to move off Lua 5.1? - How should the community handle the Neovim/LuaJIT permanent-5.1-API commitment going forward? - Should PUC-Rio adopt a more stable, less breaking-change-prone release policy to reduce fragmentation incentives? **Highlights** > Would be a lot better article if it gave like ... actual reasons? > — [technomancy on lobsters · 20 points](https://lobste.rs/s/t7wzko/lua_community_needs_learn_move_on#c_d2tkr8) > > An open source project trying to provide support for 10-year-old versions is just crazy. I've been doing this for 8 years. Not only is it not crazy, it's not even hard. There are a handful of minor inconveniences; that's all. You're making a bunch of assertions without any evidence or reasoning; assuming that things are the same in Lua as they are in other languages. They are not. Dropping support for Lua 5.3 (released in 2015) would be one of the dumbest things I could possibly do given that TIC-80 uses that version and loads of my users use TIC-80. > — [technomancy on lobsters · 6 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/t7wzko/lua_community_needs_learn_move_on#c_he1baz) > One issue that may affect the Lua community indirectly is that Neovim targets Lua 5.1, and they describe that specific version as "[the permanent interface for Nvim Lua](https://neovim.io/doc/user/lua/#lua-compat)". To be clear, I don't think that this means PUC-Rio Lua has any special obligations re 5.1, but it does mean that a LOT of code is being written with 5.1 in mind. (Also, to be clear, one nice thing about PUC-Rio Lua is that they don't take on any obligations they don't want to. Hisham is, as he says, talking about the community, not PUC-Rio. > — [telemachus on lobsters · 1 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/t7wzko/lua_community_needs_learn_move_on#c_ddph53) > > We should really be (gradually?) moving into supporting only the latest PUC-Rio Lua and the latest LuaJIT, at best. YES, I've been saying this to people for YEARS but the biggest hurdle for all of them is, as mentioned, their ecosystem breaking apart over such changes. > — [Jan200101 on lobsters · 3 points](https://lobste.rs/s/t7wzko/lua_community_needs_learn_move_on#c_ujacuc) > I think you're misreading the article; you seem to be talking about what to do with 10-year-old versions of your own programs. The article is about whether new versions of your library should support old versions **of Lua**. No one is arguing in favor of offering ongoing support for 10-year-old versions of your own code. > We should really be (gradually?) moving into supporting only the latest PUC-Rio Lua and the latest LuaJIT, at best. What you seem to be arguing for is sensible, but the argument in the article is not. > — [technomancy on lobsters · 2 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/t7wzko/lua_community_needs_learn_move_on#c_svgiic) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/t7wzko/lua_community_needs_learn_move_on) · 59 points · 21 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Human Emacs](https://daily.dev/posts/human-emacs-xc7hkpruv) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#lua](https://daily.dev/tags/lua) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on-hisham-hm-cmzudjrpo) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Lua community needs to learn to move on « hisham.hm","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on-hisham-hm-cmzudjrpo","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on-hisham-hm-cmzudjrpo"},"datePublished":"2026-08-04T18:19:38.458Z","dateModified":"2026-08-05T01:40:39.006Z","description":"Hisham Muhammad, creator of htop and LuaRocks, argues that the Lua community has developed a paralyzing habit of supporting every Lua version simultaneously —...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--HRgLpUt6--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2003","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--HRgLpUt6--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2003","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Lobsters","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Lobsters","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--tl8v_Fku--/f_auto,t_logo/v1698841318/logos/lobste.jpg","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-lua-community-needs-to-learn-to-move-on-hisham-hm-cmzudjrpo","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"lua","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Lobsters","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"The Lua community needs to learn to move on « hisham.hm"}]} ```