LuaPure — a pure Go Lua VM

luapure is a pure-Go implementation of PUC-Lua 5.4 — no cgo, no bundled C. Its instruction set, single-pass compiler, virtual machine, standard libraries, and semantics are ported directly from the reference C sources (lua-5.4.8/src), written from scratch against them, sharing no code with any other engine. The standard-library surface and observable behaviour match a stock PUC-Lua 5.4.8 build, gated by the official Lua 5.4 test suite.

Features

• Pure Go, zero cgo — go build cross-compiles anywhere Go does; no C toolchain, no lua.h, no linker flags.
• Faithful PUC-Lua 5.4.8 — same bytecode, error messages, and edge cases; loads/emits luac 5.4.8 binary chunks byte-for-byte on a 64-bit LE host.
• Complete 5.4 standard library — base, package, string, table, math, os, io, coroutine, utf8, debug.
• Go-native embedding surface PUC lacks — per-State functional options, context.Context cancellation, an instruction budget, configurable memory caps, host-module registration, and userdata.
• Sandboxing — confine untrusted scripts to safe libraries with a single option (WithSandbox); see SECURITY.md.
• Built-in debugger — in-process breakpoints/stepping plus standalone debug servers over MCP (debugmcp/) and DAP (debugdap/).

Why luapure

library	Lua version	cgo / C toolchain
gopher-lua	5.1	no
Shopify/go-lua	5.2	no
cgo bindings (golua, etc.)	real Lua 5.x	yes
luapure	5.4.8	no

If you want current Lua (5.4) semantics and a single static Go binary with no C toolchain, luapure is the gap the table above shows.

Performance

Pure Go costs roughly 1.2–1.3× PUC on table/string work and ~2.2× on a tight arithmetic loop — measured back-to-back against the C interpreter, with no cgo. See docs/BENCHMARKS.md for the full cross-engine numbers (PUC vs cgo bindings vs luapure) and methodology.

Project status

Pre-1.0 (v0.1.0, alpha). The Lua language surface tracks PUC-Lua 5.4.8 and is stable; the Go embedding API may still change before a 1.0 tag. Pin a commit or tag if you depend on it. ROADMAP.md tracks what comes next (PUC-Lua 5.5).

Install

go get github.com/htcom-code/lua-pure/lua

Requires Go 1.25.11 (the weak package for weak tables needs 1.24; the 1.25.11 floor also clears known standard-library security advisories).

Quickstart

Embed the VM, exchange a value with a script, and read the result back:

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	luapure "github.com/htcom-code/lua-pure/lua"
)

func main() {
	L := luapure.NewState()
	L.OpenLibs()

	// Expose a Go function to Lua.
	L.Register("greet", func(L *luapure.LState) int {
		who := L.CheckString(1)
		L.Push(luapure.MkString("hello, " + who))
		return 1
	})

	res, err := L.DoString(`return greet("world"), 6 * 7`, "=quickstart")
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(res[0].Str(), res[1].AsInt()) // hello, world 42
}

NewState also takes functional options, so library opening and limits can be folded into the constructor (no options = the two-step form above):

// Open the standard libraries and cap the value stack for this state only.
L := luapure.NewState(luapure.WithOpenLibs(), luapure.WithMaxStack(50000))

// A confined state for untrusted code (safe libraries only, time-limited).
L := luapure.NewState(luapure.WithSandbox(), luapure.WithContext(ctx))

WithMaxStack/WithMaxCCalls/WithMaxTableArraySize override the package globals (luaconf.go) for that state alone; other states keep the process-wide defaults.

Standalone runnable programs are in examples/ (go run ./examples/<name>); smaller doc-integrated snippets are the Example functions in lua/example_test.go, which render on pkg.go.dev.

Concurrency

An LState is a single execution context: drive each one from a single goroutine at a time, and never share a running state across goroutines. Coroutines are internal goroutines that hand off over channels, so exactly one runs at any instant — there is no parallelism inside a state to exploit, and concurrent external access would race.

NewState itself is safe to call concurrently (verified under -race), so the idiomatic way to use many cores is a pool of states — one per worker goroutine — rather than one shared state. The exported version identifiers luapure.Version / luapure.VersionString() (and the Lua globals _VERSION, _LUAPURE_VERSION) report the engine build.

Repository layout

The engine is a single Go package (one package = one directory, so it stays flat like PUC's src/; navigate it by docs/FILEMAP.md, which carries the full PUC source → Go file map and a functional index). Files keep PUC's l-prefixed names; where one PUC source is split across several Go files (Go favours smaller focused files), the parts share the PUC parent name with a suffix. Add-ons that build on its public API are separate packages.

path	package	what
lua/	luapure — import github.com/htcom-code/lua-pure/lua	the engine: VM, compiler, libraries, embedding API
debugmcp/	debugmcp	debug server over the Model Context Protocol (stdio + HTTP)
debugdap/	debugdap	debug server over the Debug Adapter Protocol (TCP)
conformance/	conformance (tests)	black-box go test suite: curated 5.4 snippets + the PUC behaviour-probe ext suite
cmd/conformance/	main	standalone driver that runs the official _lua5.4-tests/ fixtures
cmd/luadbg-mcp/, cmd/luadbg-dap/	main	standalone debug-server binaries
examples/	main (one dir each)	runnable embedding-API examples (examples/README.md)
_lua5.4-tests/	—	the official Lua 5.4 test suite (fixtures)
_glue5.4-tests/	—	extra self-asserting probes pinned to PUC 5.4 oracle values, run by the ext suite

Differences from PUC

The standard-library surface and observable semantics match a stock PUC-Lua 5.4.8 build. The deliberate divergences are structural — GC delegated to the Go runtime, a tagged-struct Value (not NaN-boxing), panic/recover error unwinding, goroutine coroutines, and configurable memory-limit caps — and a few host-dependent gaps (io.popen, dynamic C library loading). luapure also adds a Go-native embedding surface PUC lacks (per-State options, context cancellation, instruction budget, sandboxing, host-module registration, a debugger).

docs/COMPATIBILITY.md is the full, categorized list.

Documentation

• docs/COMPATIBILITY.md — how it differs from PUC
• docs/BENCHMARKS.md — cross-engine speed
• docs/FILEMAP.md — PUC source → Go file map
• ROADMAP.md — what tracks next (PUC-Lua 5.5)
• SECURITY.md — sandboxing and the threat model
• CONTRIBUTING.md — the port discipline and test gate
• CHANGELOG.md — release history
• pkg.go.dev — API reference (or make doc-web to serve it locally; make doc for text)

The conformance harness is go run ./cmd/conformance (runs the official Lua 5.4 test suite in _lua5.4-tests/).

License & attribution

luapure is a derivative work — a Go port of PUC-Lua 5.4. The language, instruction set, compiler, VM, libraries, and semantics are PUC-Rio's; this code translates them to Go and adds the Go-native adaptations listed above. Lua is MIT, as is this project; its copyright notice is retained.

• Lua: Copyright © 1994–2025 Lua.org, PUC-Rio (MIT) — https://www.lua.org/ — full notice in LICENSE-Lua (the engine is ported from it).
• luapure: the Go port and Go-native adaptations, MIT — see LICENSE.

Both are MIT and compatible.