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.

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Jyaif 3 days ago | parent [-]

Have you considered using wasm as the foundation for Roblox, instead of Luau?

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parenwielder 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

As it stands, we already have a high-performance, sandboxed VM that we are maintaining successfully, and our editor environment is decidedly _not_ multilingual for historical reasons/lack of investment. It'd be very, very expensive for us to see any of the advantages of wasm for the platform today, and it wouldn't really do anything about our existing need to support the millions of lines of code written in Luau today.

Also strategically, wasm is a massive project coordinated by a large number of companies, and it doesn't seem especially prudent to bet the success of a single multibillion dollar company and their entire platform on a project that they don't control the destiny of.

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HaroldCindy 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. I think an underappreciated aspect of choosing a script VM in the space Roblox is in (user-generated content where scripts are content) your product is at the mercy of whoever controls your scripting implementation.

The scripting engine is an integral part of your product, and you need to "own" it end-to-end. Any bugs that creep into new versions of your scripting engine, any API breakage or design changes that impact your usecase are things that you are responsible for. Roblox owns the entire toolchain for Luau, and it's relatively small compared to the set of libraries required to compile to and execute WASM in a performant way.

The nuances of your typical JITing WASM runtime or V8 are pretty hard to learn compared to a simpler VM like Luau, it's a big reason why I've used Luau in my own projects.

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binary132 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

how sandboxed is Luau really?

	▲	parenwielder 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		enough that we run a multibillion dollar business entirely off of executing untrusted code on our hardware

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westurner 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

LunarEngine is built on raylib, which compiles to WASM. FWIU it might be possible to compile a Luau game to WASM with LunarEngine eventually.

"LunarEngine: An open source, Roblox-compatible game engine" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44995147