Lua scripting/status

Last update on: 2012-02-01

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 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

2012-02-01
Rob Lanphier publicized the decision to move forward with Lua as the scripting language for MediaWiki templates.