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Yup. For semantics, I'm sure you can find some corner cases where closures behave differently, and the prototypal inheritance also probably differs in some significant ways. I haven't thought about it in awhile.

I'm not concerned too much about performance because I don't think Python is too slow 99% of the time, and node.js is faster than Python.

So personally I don't think there is a strong motivation anymore, but if anyone tackles it I'll try it out for sure :)

Another motivation I forgot to mention was sandboxing. Actually that was motivation for the same idea with Python <-> Lua. I have a ton of of Python code lying around. A lot of it can be extended by the user. I want to expose some of these things as network services, but it is hilariously insecure to accept Python code from users in any way. I also have a bunch of coworkers who already know Python. So it would be cool if I could somehow have a sandboxed Python interpreter (this has been talked about MANY times on pyhon-dev, etc.; not doable with CPython).

One way to get that is to try to compile Python to the Lua byte code (not portable across versions), or to Lua source code. I think the semantic delta is even higher, so it's probably not going to work very well. You would end up halfway to writing a Python interpreter in Lua (e.g. semantics of dictionaries)

PyPy has some sandboxing I hear but it's too heavyweight/early right now.

Lua is really nice. I want to use it, and has advantages over Python and JS, but I can't seem to justify it for any project. The network effects of tools/libraries in Python and JS always win out.




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