Lux

Dev tools

package manager

SHOW HN2025

268points
136comments
#209of 3,837 in 2025
Top 6%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

12 positive, 23 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 13 critical, out of 48 comments about the project. Thread score -0.03.

Design: 3 for, 6 againstIdea: 5 for, 3 againstPerformance: 3 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstDocs: 0 for, 2 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Welcome better Lua package tooling than luarocks

    From 3 comments
    • finally, someone did it! luarocks was never an intuitive solution, and I feel this unintuitive ecosystem is one of the reasons for lua's low adoption.
      opem on HN
    • Nice! Lua really needed something like this to make packages easier.
      thundervelvet on HN
    • I like this. I've been wanting to have a reproducible way to install Lua packages across machines for a while now.
      rcarmo on HN
  • Good support for the Neovim ecosystem

    From 1 comment
    • Thank you for treating neovim ecosystem first-class. During plugin development I missed ease of use of third party libraries I have with e.g. Rust and Typescript.
      ivanjermakov on HN

Objections

  • Rust and TOML go against Lua's embedded, simple culture

    From 2 comments
    • A package manager written in Rust for a language designed to be embedded in C and which relies heavily on C libraries, and also configured in TOML when Lua itself was created to…
      inftech on HN
    • A package manager for Lua that depends on Rust.
      1vuio0pswjnm7 on HN
  • Config should be Lua rather than TOML

    From 2 comments
    • Why not use Lua for config instead of TOML? IIRC Lua was originally a data schema language, so it should be good for it.
      Arch485 on HN
    • I'm excited to check it out, but why does this use a .toml file when Lua was already designed for configuration files? Why isn't it just a Lua script?
      debugnik on HN
  • Language-specific package managers are the wrong direction; prefer nix

    From 1 comment
    • Personally I'm really tired of all these language specific package managers. I just don't feel that is the right direction, stuff like nix seem like much better approach.
      zokier on HN

Requests

  • Integrate with package.path and package.cpath

    From 1 comment
    • I don't see this listed here or the other associated sites, so I'll ask: 1. Does this integrate natively with `package.path` and `package.cpath`? 2. Does it detect non-standard,…
      andrewmcwatters on HN
  • Support installing from GitHub user/repository

    From 1 comment
    • I don't see this listed here or the other associated sites, so I'll ask: 1. Does this integrate natively with `package.path` and `package.cpath`? 2. Does it detect non-standard,…
      andrewmcwatters on HN
  • Add luvit integration

    From 1 comment
    • Has anyone used this? In my ~/.bash_profile, I have "eval "$(luarocks path --bin)"" which is very slow, and it needs to be called. How does this work with "lux"? Additionally, I…
      johnisgood on HN

Questions

  • How are diamond dependencies handled?

    From 1 comment
    • How do you deal with the diamond dependency problem? Do you allow two different versions of a package to be exist simultaneously?
      Onavo on HN
  • Does it work with LuaJIT and existing luarocks path setup?

    From 1 comment
    • Has anyone used this? In my ~/.bash_profile, I have "eval "$(luarocks path --bin)"" which is very slow, and it needs to be called. How does this work with "lux"? Additionally, I…
      johnisgood on HN

Alternatives named

  • luarocks

    From 2 comments
    • This sounds amazing. I use Lua a lot, and luarocks has been nearly useless for anything I need it to do because it's so heavily opinionated. For anything more than "install a…
      MyOutfitIsVague on HN
    • Why not use Lua for config instead of TOML? IIRC Lua was originally a data schema language, so it should be good for it.
      Arch485 on HN
  • nix

    From 1 comment
    • Personally I'm really tired of all these language specific package managers. I just don't feel that is the right direction, stuff like nix seem like much better approach.
      zokier on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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