I used to use Lua and later LuaJIT in Lumix Engine. I switched to Luau because of its type system. However, it's apparent it was not meant to be used outside Roblox, as it has many rough corners. The documentation is not great, and the community is basically nonexistent - I got zero results when searching for any issues I encountered. Also, it's huge compared to Lua or LuaJIT, causing my project to compile 7x slower. The API is not great (e.g., an async API that blocks, using STL in the API, leaking STL headers). I encounter bugs with analysis/LSP often. Overall, I consider moving away from it.

We definitely intend on folks being able to use Luau outside of Roblox, and we know of a number of folks doing so quite successfully including Remedy Entertainment (Alan Wake 2), Digital Extremes (Warframe), GIANTS Software (Farming Simulator 25).

That being said, it has been historically hard to get major investment into work actively supporting growth of the language off-platform since our entire team is employed to work on the project by Roblox. We are nevertheless changing this though, and investing in the language outside of the platform. As some folks have already mentioned here, we have a general-purpose standalone runtime that we're developing called Lute that's focused on using Luau outside of Roblox to write general-purpose programs, and we're building a whole suite of Luau-programmable developer tools for the language atop it.

It takes time to build things, and the Luau ecosystem is definitely still very young as you've noted, but it's something that we care a lot about and are investing in considerably going forward. We 100% believe that the best thing for the health of the language and the ecosystem is to support more diverse users and more diverse use-cases.

I use Luau with my Unity game for all gameplay code (60k+ loc so far). I agree the docs could be improved, especially for custom integrations. The new type system + LSP aren't great together yet either, and I've been a little worried about the direction since zeux left the team.

But otherwise I really like it. My Luau code hot reloads almost instantly while the game is running, and my C++ project compiles quickly when I update it. I like that it provides sandboxing if you want to support modding. And there's an active community of people on the official Discord, which is better than nothing.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious why it would cause your project to compile slower though? It's a scripting language, so you don't need to compile anything, right? Do you mean compiling the Luau VM itself?

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