Install luau with Homebrew, apk, Nix, pacman, scoop

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• luau
• luau-analyze
• luau-ast
• luau-compile
• luau-reduce

Project history

Luau grew out of Roblox's long use of Lua for user-generated gameplay and internal application code. The Luau team says Roblox chose Lua for simplicity, embedding, execution control, and coroutine support, then evolved it to improve performance, ergonomics, safety, and tooling while preserving Lua's design goals.

On November 3, 2021, Roblox announced that Luau was becoming a separate open-source language rather than an inseparable part of Roblox. The announcement made the runtime, compiler, type checker, and linter available under the MIT license and opened the language RFC process to the public.

Adoption history

Luau's largest adoption base remains Roblox itself: the origins post describes it as powering millions of Roblox experiences and large amounts of Roblox app and Studio functionality. Open-sourcing made it usable outside Roblox, and the project says it has seen increased adoption in other projects and applications.

Package-manager adoption followed the open-source release. The input metadata lists Luau packages in Homebrew, Alpine, Nix, Arch, and Scoop, which makes the command-line compiler and analyzer available to non-Roblox workflows.

How it is used

Luau ships command-line tools for running scripts and analyzing code. The getting-started documentation shows luau for execution and luau-analyze for static analysis, type checking, and linting.

For embedders, the language is designed around a small standard library and host-provided APIs. That makes Luau useful both as a Roblox scripting language and as a sandboxable embedded scripting runtime.

Why package nerds care

Luau matters to package history because it is a modern, typed Lua-family runtime with a large production origin and standalone package-manager distribution. It is not just a Lua library: it ships a compiler, analyzer, AST tools, and runtime pieces as CLI binaries.

For Lua ecosystem watchers, Luau is one answer to the long-running question of how Lua-like languages can add typing, tooling, and safety without giving up embeddability.

Timeline

• 2006: Roblox begins using Lua-style scripting for user-generated behaviors.
• 2021: Roblox announces Luau as a separate open-source language on November 3.
• 2022: The Luau team publishes its origins and evolution history.
• 2023: Open-source release binaries add native code generation support compiled in by default.

Related projects

• Lua 5.1 is the language base Luau started from.
• Roblox Studio is the main application environment for Luau developers.
• LuaJIT is a related high-performance Lua-family runtime, but Luau focuses on gradual typing and Roblox-compatible embedding.

Sources

• https://luau.org/
• https://luau.org/getting-started/
• https://luau.org/library/
• https://luau.org/news/2021-11-03-luau-goes-open-source/
• https://luau.org/news/2022-11-04-luau-origins-and-evolution/
• source_facts.package-manager