Lua which language?

Let’s get started.

Lua is a robust, lightweight, and embeddable scripting language that supports multiple programming methods, including procedural, object-oriented, functional, and data-driven programming.

As the primary focus on Lua is for scripting, it is rarely used as a standalone programming language. Instead, it is used as a scripting language that can be integrated (embedded) into other programs written in mainly C and C++. It also supports other programming languages via third-party plugins (NLua/KeraLua for .NET/C#).

Popular use cases for Lua include:

Being a scripting language, Lua does not have its own main application. Instead, it acts exclusively as an embedded part of the host application.

(Explore the most popular programming languages.)

There are two main components of Lua:

Lua is not directly interpreted through a Lua file like other languages such as Python. Instead, it uses the Lua interpreter to compile a Lua file to bytecode. The Lua interpreter is written in ANSI C, making it highly portable and capable of running on a multitude of devices.

Usually, the compilation is done at the runtime. However, sometimes it can be done before the runtime to increase load times. Then the Lua virtual machine will run this compiled bytecode. The register-based architecture of the Lua virtual machine closely resembles actual hardware architectures, and it will increase the overall performance of the program.

So, what’s so great about Lua? These are the defining features:

Lua is considered one of the fastest programming languages among interpreted scripting languages. In particular, Lua can perform large task orders faster than most other programming languages in both benchmarking and real-world scenarios.

For more speed, an independent implementation of Lua called LuaJIT uses a just-in-time compiler that makes Lua even faster.

Lua has a considerably smaller footprint than other programming languages, with its complete source code and documentation taking a mere 1.3 MB. The Lua interpreter with all the standard libraries takes 278K, while the complete Lua library takes only 466K.

This small size is ideal when integrating Lua into multiple platforms, from embedded devices to massive game engines, where every byte is valuable.

With its small size, the portability of Lua is nearly unlimited; any platform that supports the standard C compiler can run Lua out of the box. Lua’s speed and size become huge advantages when embedding Lua with another programming language. That’s because they can help increase the speed of the program without hindering any existing functionality.

Importantly, Lua does not require complex rewrites to be compatible with other programming languages. Lua can be used with primary programming languages like C, C++, Java, C#, etc.. and other scripting languages like Perl and Ruby, further extending its usability.

Lua is simple in design yet provides powerful functionality. One of the core features of Lua is meta-mechanisms which enable developers to implement features—rather than providing a bunch of features directly in the language itself.

Lua also comes with incremental garbage collection, reducing memory usage and implementation complexity. Its sandboxing feature can be used to isolate functions and resources. This increases the security of the program and provides coroutines for multitasking.

All these features come with a simple syntax and easily understandable format so that anyone can easily pick up Lua and use it in their programs.

Lua is free and open-source software distributed under the MIT license. This means anyone can use Lua for any purpose without paying any licensing or royalty fees.

Like any language, Lua has its pros and cons.

As a scripting language without major limitations, you can use Lua for any scenario, from a simple backend script in a web server to complex game development.

Lua is highly prevalent in video game development as it can be used to create functionality without contaminating the overall performance while also keeping everything separate.

Another area that Lua excels is embedded programming, where size and performance are major concerns. Lua can be used in everyday applications to extend the existing functionality or create new features and functions.

Some popular games, programs, and services that use Lua are Dark Souls, Fable II, Garry’s Mod, Wireshark, VLC, Apache, and Nginx Web Servers.

How does Lua stack up against other languages?

Here’s a look at the differences between the high-level general programming language Python, the high-level object-oriented Java, and web-focused Javascript—all compared to Lua.

Now, let’s see how to set up a development environment in Windows. First, we’ll install Lua.

Navigate to the Lua.org download page. Here, we will be using a precompiled binary to install Lua in windows. So, click on “get a binary link” as shown in the below screenshot.

Click “Download” on the LuaBinaries page, and you will be redirected to a page with a list of precompiled binaries. Select the appropriate version from that list.

We will be using the latest Lua version for Windows 64 bit.

This will direct the user to a SourceForge page, where the binary will be downloaded.

Move the downloaded Zip file to any location to store the binaries permanently.

Here, we will be using the “D:\Program Files\Lua” as the location. After moving the Zip file, simply extract its content using any compression utility (Ex: Windows Explorer, 7zip, WinRar).

We need to add the location of Lua binaries to the system PATH so that Windows can call Lua from anywhere in the system.

Step 4.1. Navigate to Environment Variables. (Open Windows Explorer, right-click on This PC, and select properties.)

Step 4.2. Click on “Advanced System Settings” in the screen that appears and then click on “Environment Variables”.

Step 4.3. In the system variables section, add the location of the Lua executables as a new entry for the Path variable.

Check if the system identifies Lua by opening up a command prompt or a PowerShell window and typing the Lua command (Lua with the version – lua54).

Now that we have installed Lua in the system, we need a development environment to go ahead with coding. For that, we can choose between:

We will be using VSCode for this instance.

Let’s create a file called “lua_basic.lua” in VSCode and save that file in the desired location. Then we will type some print statements there like the following.

Our Lua program needs to be compiled before running, so we need to create a Build Task. To do that, click on Terminal Menu, then Run Built Task and select the Configure Build Task Option.

( There will be different build task templates depending on the VSCode configuration. Select “Create tasks.json from template” and finally the “Others” option to define a custom build task.)

Run Build Task

Configure Build Task

Create tasks.json from template

Other

Step 2.1. We will add the following code block to configure the task. In that code block, we have defined a task called “Run Lua” that will run on the shell with the command “lua54”. That command will take the current file as the argument and carry out a build operation.

task.json

Open up the “lua_basic.lua” file again. Then go to the “Terminal” again and click on “Run Build Task” or use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+B.

This will compile the file and provide us with the output.

That’s it! Now we have a working Lua development environment that can be used to create Lua scripts. We can use the official Lua reference manual to explore the Lua language further.

Lua is a powerful scripting language that has limitless potential to add functionality to any program on a multitude of platforms to suit any use case.

Lua has been somewhat eclipsed from the public view by languages like Python and JavaScript, but Lua has several advantages that make it popular in some major software projects. Lua is easily embedded within other languages, meaning that you can include Lua files in the code base of something written in (for instance) Java and it runs as if it were native Java code. It sounds like magic, but of course there are projects like luaj working to make it possible, and it's only possible because Lua is designed for it. It's partly because of this flexibility that you're likely to find Lua as the scripting language for video games, graphic applications, and more.

As with anything, it takes time to perfect, but Lua is easy (and fun) to learn. It's a consistent language, a friendly language with useful error messages, and there's lots of great support online. Ready to get started?

On Linux, you can install Lua using your distribution's package manager. For instance, on Fedora, CentOS, Mageia, OpenMandriva, and similar distributions:

On Debian and Debian-based systems:

For Mac, you can use MacPorts or Homebrew.

For Windows, install Lua using Chocolatey.

To test Lua in an interactive interpreter, type lua in a terminal.

As with many programming languages, Lua syntax generally involves a built-in function or keyword, followed by an argument. For instance, the print function displays any argument you provide to it.

Lua's string library can manipulate words (called "strings" in programming.) For instance, to count the letters in a string, you use the len function of the string library:

A variable allows you to create a special place in your computer's memory for temporary data. You can create variables in Lua by inventing a name for your variable, and then putting some data into it.

Second only to the popularity of variables in programming is the popularity of arrays. The word "array" literally means an arrangement, and that's all a programming array is. It's a specific arrangement of data, and because there is an arrangement, an array has the advantage of being structured. An array is often used to perform essentially the same purpose as a variable, except that an array can enforce an order to its data. In Lua, an array is called a table.

Creating a table is like creating a variable, except that you set its initial content to two braces ({}):

When you add data to a table, it's also a lot like creating a variable, except that your variable name always begins with the name of the table, and is separated with a dot:

Running Lua in the terminal is great for getting instant feedback, but it's more useful to run Lua as a script. A Lua script is just a text file containing Lua code, which the Lua command can interpret and execute.

The eternal question, when just starting to learn a programming language, is how you're supposed to know what to write. This article has provided a good start, but so far you only know two or three Lua functions. The key, of course, is in documentation. The Lua language isn't that complex, and it's very reasonable to refer to the Lua documentation site for a list of keywords and functions.

Here's a practice problem.

Suppose you want to write a Lua script that counts words in a sentence. As with many programming challenges, there are many ways to go about this, but say the first relevant function you find in the Lua docs is string.gmatch, which can search for a specific character in a string. Words are usually separated by an empty space, so you decide that counting spaces + 1 ought to render a reasonably accurate count of the words they're separating.

Here's the code for that function:

These are the components of that sample code:

Now that you've created a function all your own, you can use it. That's an important thing to remember about a function. It doesn't run on its own. It waits for you to call it in your code.

Type this sample code into a text file and save it as words.lua:

You've just created a Lua script. You can run it with Lua. Can you find the problem with this method of counting words?

You might notice that the count is incorrect for the final phrase because there's a trailing space in the argument. Lua correctly detected the space and tallied it into count, but the word count is incorrect because that particular space happens not to delimit a word. I leave it to you to solve that problem, or to find other ways in which this method isn't ideal. There's a lot of rumination in programming. Sometimes it's purely academic, and other times it's a question of whether an application works at all.

Lua (/ˈluːə/ LOO-ə; from Portuguese: lua [ˈlu(w)ɐ] meaning moon) is a lightweight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded use in applications.[3] Lua is cross-platform, since the interpreter of compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C,[4] and Lua has a relatively simple C API to embed it into applications.[5]

Lua originated in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. It provided the basic facilities of most procedural programming languages, but more complicated or domain-specific features were not included; rather, it included mechanisms for extending the language, allowing programmers to implement such features. As Lua was intended to be a general embeddable extension language, the designers of Lua focused on improving its speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development.

Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.

From 1977 until 1992, Brazil had a policy of strong trade barriers (called a market reserve) for computer hardware and software. In that atmosphere, Tecgraf's clients could not afford, either politically or financially, to buy customized software from abroad. Those reasons led Tecgraf to implement the basic tools it needed from scratch.[6]

Lua's predecessors were the data-description/configuration languages SOL (Simple Object Language) and DEL (data-entry language).[7] They had been independently developed at Tecgraf in 1992–1993 to add some flexibility into two different projects (both were interactive graphical programs for engineering applications at Petrobras company). There was a lack of any flow-control structures in SOL and DEL, and Petrobras felt a growing need to add full programming power to them.

In The Evolution of Lua, the language's authors wrote:[6]

Lua 1.0 was designed in such a way that its object constructors, being then slightly different from the current light and flexible style, incorporated the data-description syntax of SOL (hence the name Lua: Sol meaning "Sun" in Portuguese, and Lua meaning "Moon"). Lua syntax for control structures was mostly borrowed from Modula (if, while, repeat/until), but also had taken influence from CLU (multiple assignments and multiple returns from function calls, as a simpler alternative to reference parameters or explicit pointers), C++ ("neat idea of allowing a local variable to be declared only where we need it"[6]), SNOBOL and AWK (associative arrays). In an article published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, Lua's creators also state that LISP and Scheme with their single, ubiquitous data-structure mechanism (the list) were a major influence on their decision to develop the table as the primary data structure of Lua.[8]

Lua semantics have been increasingly influenced by Scheme over time,[6] especially with the introduction of anonymous functions and full lexical scoping. Several features were added in new Lua versions.

Versions of Lua prior to version 5.0 were released under a license similar to the BSD license. From version 5.0 onwards, Lua has been licensed under the MIT License. Both are permissive free software licences and are almost identical.

Lua is commonly described as a "multi-paradigm" language, providing a small set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types. Lua does not contain explicit support for inheritance, but allows it to be implemented with metatables. Similarly, Lua allows programmers to implement namespaces, classes, and other related features using its single table implementation; first-class functions allow the employment of many techniques from functional programming; and full lexical scoping allows fine-grained information hiding to enforce the principle of least privilege.

In general, Lua strives to provide simple, flexible meta-features that can be extended as needed, rather than supply a feature-set specific to one programming paradigm. As a result, the base language is light—the full reference interpreter is only about 247 kB compiled[4]—and easily adaptable to a broad range of applications.

A dynamically typed language intended for use as an extension language or scripting language, Lua is compact enough to fit on a variety of host platforms. It supports only a small number of atomic data structures such as boolean values, numbers (double-precision floating point and 64-bit integers by default), and strings. Typical data structures such as arrays, sets, lists, and records can be represented using Lua's single native data structure, the table, which is essentially a heterogeneous associative array.

Lua implements a small set of advanced features such as first-class functions, garbage collection, closures, proper tail calls, coercion (automatic conversion between string and number values at run time), coroutines (cooperative multitasking) and dynamic module loading.

The classic "Hello, World!" program can be written as follows:[9]

or as:

A comment in Lua starts with a double-hyphen and runs to the end of the line, similar to Ada, Eiffel, Haskell, SQL and VHDL. Multi-line strings and comments are adorned with double square brackets.

The factorial function is implemented as a function in this example:

Lua has one type of conditional test: if then end with optional else and elseif then execution control constructs.

The generic if then end statement requires all three keywords:

The else keyword may be added with an accompanying statement block to control execution when the if condition evaluates to false:

Execution may also be controlled according to multiple conditions using the elseif then keywords:

Lua has four types of conditional loops: the while loop, the repeat loop (similar to a do while loop), the numeric for loop, and the generic for loop.

The generic for loop:

would iterate over the table _G using the standard iterator function pairs, until it returns nil.

Loops can also be nested (put inside of another loop).

Lua's treatment of functions as first-class values is shown in the following example, where the print function's behavior is modified:

Any future calls to print will now be routed through the new function, and because of Lua's lexical scoping, the old print function will only be accessible by the new, modified print.

Lua also supports closures, as demonstrated below:

A new closure for the variable x is created every time addto is called, so that each new anonymous function returned will always access its own x parameter. The closure is managed by Lua's garbage collector, just like any other object.

Tables are the most important data structures (and, by design, the only built-in composite data type) in Lua and are the foundation of all user-created types. They are associative arrays with addition of automatic numeric key and special syntax.

A table is a collection of key and data pairs, where the data is referenced by key; in other words, it is a hashed heterogeneous associative array.

Tables are created using the {} constructor syntax.

Tables are always passed by reference (see Call by sharing).

A key (index) can be any value except nil and NaN, including functions.

A table is often used as structure (or record) by using strings as keys. Because such use is very common, Lua features a special syntax for accessing such fields.[10]

By using a table to store related functions, it can act as a namespace.

Tables are automatically assigned a numerical key, enabling them to be used as an array data type. The first automatic index is 1 rather than 0 as it is for many other programming languages (though an explicit index of 0 is allowed).

A numeric key 1 is distinct from a string key "1".

The length of a table t is defined to be any integer index n such that t[n] is not nil and t[n+1] is nil; moreover, if t[1] is nil, n can be zero. For a regular array, with non-nil values from 1 to a given n, its length is exactly that n, the index of its last value. If the array has "holes" (that is, nil values between other non-nil values), then #t can be any of the indices that directly precedes a nil value (that is, it may consider any such nil value as the end of the array).[11]

A table can be an array of objects.

Using a hash map to emulate an array is normally slower than using an actual array; however, Lua tables are optimized for use as arrays to help avoid this issue.[12]

Extensible semantics is a key feature of Lua, and the metatable concept allows powerful customization of tables. The following example demonstrates an "infinite" table. For any n, fibs[n] will give the n-th Fibonacci number using dynamic programming and memoization.

Although Lua does not have a built-in concept of classes, object-oriented programming can be emulated using functions and tables. An object is formed by putting methods and fields in a table. Inheritance (both single and multiple) can be implemented with metatables, delegating nonexistent methods and fields to a parent object.

There is no such concept as "class" with these techniques; rather, prototypes are used, similar to Self or JavaScript. New objects are created either with a factory method (that constructs new objects from scratch) or by cloning an existing object.

Creating a basic vector object:

Here, setmetatable tells Lua to look for an element in the Vector table if it is not present in the vec table. vec.magnitude, which is equivalent to vec["magnitude"], first looks in the vec table for the magnitude element. The vec table does not have a magnitude element, but its metatable delegates to the Vector table for the magnitude element when it's not found in the vec table.

Lua provides some syntactic sugar to facilitate object orientation. To declare member functions inside a prototype table, one can use function table:func(args), which is equivalent to function table.func(self, args). Calling class methods also makes use of the colon: object:func(args) is equivalent to object.func(object, args).

That in mind, here is a corresponding class with : syntactic sugar:

Lua supports using metatables to give Lua class inheritance.[13] In this example, we allow vectors to have their values multiplied by a constant in a derived class.

Lua also supports multiple inheritance; __index can either be a function or a table.[14] Operator overloading can also be done; Lua metatables can have elements such as __add, __sub, and so on.[15]

Lua programs are not interpreted directly from the textual Lua file, but are compiled into bytecode, which is then run on the Lua virtual machine. The compilation process is typically invisible to the user and is performed during run-time, especially when a JIT compiler is used, but it can be done offline in order to increase loading performance or reduce the memory footprint of the host environment by leaving out the compiler. Lua bytecode can also be produced and executed from within Lua, using the dump function from the string library and the load/loadstring/loadfile functions. Lua version 5.3.4 is implemented in approximately 24,000 lines of C code.[3][4]

Like most CPUs, and unlike most virtual machines (which are stack-based), the Lua VM is register-based, and therefore more closely resembles an actual hardware design. The register architecture both avoids excessive copying of values and reduces the total number of instructions per function. The virtual machine of Lua 5 is one of the first register-based pure VMs to have a wide use.[16] Parrot and Android's Dalvik are two other well-known register-based VMs. PCScheme's VM was also register-based.[17]

This example is the bytecode listing of the factorial function defined above (as shown by the luac 5.1 compiler):[18]

Lua is intended to be embedded into other applications, and provides a C API for this purpose. The API is divided into two parts: the Lua core and the Lua auxiliary library.[19] The Lua API's design eliminates the need for manual reference management in C code, unlike Python's API. The API, like the language, is minimalistic. Advanced functionality is provided by the auxiliary library, which consists largely of preprocessor macros which assist with complex table operations.

The Lua C API is stack based. Lua provides functions to push and pop most simple C data types (integers, floats, etc.) to and from the stack, as well as functions for manipulating tables through the stack. The Lua stack is somewhat different from a traditional stack; the stack can be indexed directly, for example. Negative indices indicate offsets from the top of the stack. For example, −1 is the top (most recently pushed value), while positive indices indicate offsets from the bottom (oldest value). Marshalling data between C and Lua functions is also done using the stack. To call a Lua function, arguments are pushed onto the stack, and then the lua_call is used to call the actual function. When writing a C function to be directly called from Lua, the arguments are read from the stack.

Here is an example of calling a Lua function from C:

Running this example gives:

The C API also provides some special tables, located at various "pseudo-indices" in the Lua stack. At LUA_GLOBALSINDEX prior to Lua 5.2[20] is the globals table, _G from within Lua, which is the main namespace. There is also a registry located at LUA_REGISTRYINDEX where C programs can store Lua values for later retrieval.

Besides standard library (core) modules it is possible to write extensions using the Lua API. Extension modules are shared objects which can be used to extend the functionality of the interpreter by providing native facilities to Lua scripts. Lua scripts may load extension modules using require,[19] just like modules written in Lua itself, or with package.loadlib.[21] When a C library is loaded via require('foo') Lua will look for the function luaopen_foo and call it, which acts as any C function callable from Lua and generally returns a table filled with methods . A growing collection of modules known as rocks are available through a package management system called LuaRocks,[22] in the spirit of CPAN, RubyGems and Python eggs. Prewritten Lua bindings exist for most popular programming languages, including other scripting languages.[23] For C++, there are a number of template-based approaches and some automatic binding generators.

In video game development, Lua is widely used as a scripting language by programmers, mainly due to its perceived easiness to embed, fast execution, and short learning curve.[24] Notable games which use Lua include Roblox,[25] Garry's Mod, World of Warcraft, Payday 2, Phantasy Star Online 2, Dota 2, Crysis,[26] and many others. Some games that do not natively support Lua programming or scripting, have this functionality added by mods, such as ComputerCraft does for Minecraft. In addition, Lua is also used in non-video game software, such as Adobe Lightroom, Moho, iClone, Aerospike and certain system software in FreeBSD and NetBSD, and is used as a template scripting language on MediaWiki using the Scribunto extension.[27]

In 2003, a poll conducted by GameDev.net showed Lua was the most popular scripting language for game programming.[28] On 12 January 2012, Lua was announced as a winner of the Front Line Award 2011 from the magazine Game Developer in the category Programming Tools.[29]

A large number of non-game applications also use Lua for extensibility, such as LuaTeX, an implementation of the TeX type-setting language, Redis, a key-value database, Neovim, a text editor, Nginx, a web server, and Wireshark, a network packet analyzer.

Through the Scribunto extension, Lua is available as a server-side scripting language in the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia and other wikis.[30] Among its uses are allowing the integration of data from Wikidata into articles,[31] and powering the automated taxobox system.

In addition, the Lua users community provides some power patches on top of the reference C implementation.[41]

But game development is just one way that Lua comes in handy. The wildly popular language can also be used to build applications from scratch or extend the functionality of existing software.

In our new free course Learn Lua, you’ll learn the fundamentals of the general-purpose, embeddable programming language. You’ll practice using Lua data types, controlling the flow of a program with conditional logic, and building functions to pass data through them. If you’ve never coded before, don’t be intimidated — we’ll explain everything you need to know each step of the way.

Here’s what you need to know about Lua, the fast and flexible programming language taking the gaming world by storm.

Lua is a powerful and efficient general-purpose programming language that was created in Brazil in 1993. Fun fact: Lua was inspired by the programming language SOL (Simple Object Language), and in Portuguese, “sol” means “sun.” When it came time to name the new language, the team of professors at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro thought of “lua,” because it means “moon.”

The dynamically-typed, embeddable scripting language has a simple syntax that’s similar to Python. Lua code is read line by line, from top to bottom, making it concise and easy to read and write. Here’s an example of a Lua code snippet you’ll practice writing in the course Learn Lua:

Lua is unique because it’s designed to be used as an “extension language,” which means that it can be embedded in any other platform or system, explains Brandon Haffen, a Video Game Software Engineer who worked on the course Learn Lua. Developers can use Lua to fully customize products, and Lua can interoperate with any C code. “Taking the existing functionality of something and extending it is extremely fun,” he says.

Whether you’re making new game systems, quickly changing a website to add a bespoke feature, or building a unique tool to level-up your favorite art program, Lua can facilitate changes to pretty much any basic system, existing application, or hardware (even down to tiny microchips), Brandon says. Lua’s small size, flexibility, and portability, makes it a go-to for extending all kinds of programs. “How could you not get hyped about the cool new feature you added to something you already use?” he adds.

Lua can be used to develop games, web apps, and developer tools. The mobile payment app Venmo, for example, was built using Lua. And the game Angry Birds was made using Lua and the game engine LÖVE. “However, it’s most useful for people to learn if they want to add new functionality to an existing game, website, or application that allows Lua code to extend it,” Brandon says.

A lot of popular games and gaming platforms support using Lua to extend or create new game systems, Brandon says. The gaming platform Roblox, for example, allows players to write code in Lua to create their own original games. In the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, you can use Lua add-ons (aka “mods”) to customize the game interface.

More of a photographer than a gamer? Lua is also built into the image-editing software Adobe Lightroom, so you can build your own plug-ins that help streamline your workflow and organize photos.

Ready to jump in and try our free course Learn Lua? In Learn Lua, you’ll start working with different data types, variables, operators, conditionals, and functions. And you’ll get to put your Lua skills into practice creating a receipt generator for a (totally made-up) Mystic Moon Potion Shop. After taking this course, you’ll have the foundational skills you need to build an iconic game like Roblox and Angry Birds. (Check out these inspirational games built by members of the Codecademy community.)

If this is your first time learning to code, Lua is a great starter language because it’s straightforward. “The good thing about Lua is that it is very minimalistic,” Brandon says. “There is usually only one way to accomplish something.” With other languages, there may be multiple shortcuts or ways to execute something, which can be a little bit tedious when you’re starting out.

You can take your Lua knowledge a step further with the skill path Scan Systems with Nmap. You’ll learn how to use Lua to write scripts for the ethical hacking tool Network Mapper (Nmap), which is used in network discovery and security auditing.

And if you want to learn more about how popular video games like Roblox are created, be sure to check out our free course Introduction to Game Development or our blog post on other popular game development programming languages.