A fast, lightweight scripting language designed and maintained by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Pronounced "
loo-uh," the name means "moon" in Portuguese. It is free software but not open source, as it is written entirely by PUC-Rio. Introduced in 1993, Lua is known for its speed and small memory footprint. It is used in embedded systems as well as games on Windows, Unix/Linux and smartphone platforms and is easily integrated with programs written in other languages. Although not object oriented, it has mechanisms for creating classes and inheritance. See
object-oriented programming and
programming language.