The Lua community needs to learn to move on

This story is about the Lua community's struggle in keeping up with newer versions of the language and its associated tools. Mike Pall, a key figure in the LuaJIT community, recently deleted old tags for LuaJIT versions from his GitHub repo, which forced developers to upgrade. This action, while potentially unfriendly, makes sense due to the ongoing bug reports for very old Lua versions.

The Lua community has a history of being reluctant to move away from older versions, even when newer versions are available. This issue has been exacerbated since the split between Lua and LuaJIT around the release of Lua 5.2, 15 years ago. Many Lua libraries have been built around specific versions of Lua, making it difficult for maintainers to keep up with the latest versions.

The author of this story suggests that the Lua community should move towards supporting only the latest versions of Lua (PUC-Rio and LuaJIT) and proposes a new language called Teal, which aims to bridge the version gaps between Lua versions.