Lua scripting/status

Last update on: 2012-04-05

2011-08-31
Volunteer Victor Vasiliev worked on a MediaWiki extension to embed scripts into pages; this was a result of discussions over the years about replacing ad-hoc template- and ParserFunctions-based logic by a more efficient and powerful solution. Tim Starling discussed the extension with Victor to become more familiar with his work, and researched other alternatives. He (Tim) wrote a PHP extension embedding a Lua interpreter, and added support for it to the existing Lua MediaWiki extension for backward compatibility.

2011-09-30
Tim Starling did some prototyping and testing on this project. He created a test harness that can be used to trial the various approaches, and made a Wikitext-to-Lua template converter to test the relative performance. 

2011-10-31
This project was mostly on hold in October.

2012-01-26
We made a decision to move forward with Lua. Details coming to wikitech-l

2012-01-31
A team of Wikimedia engineers agreed on Lua as the language to implement as a production-ready replacement for MediaWiki markup-based templates. Tim Starling will lead this effort after the 1.19 deployment and Git migration.

2012-04-05
Tim Starling is currently working on the replacement of ordinary wikitext markup with Lua and says that he is halfway done, and hopes to finish in the next few weeks.