Lua on the BEAM - Dave Lucia & Robert Virding | Code BEAM Europe 2024

CodeSync · May 22, 2025, 1:00pm

This talk was recorded at Code BEAM Europe in October 2024. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://codebebeameurope.com

Luerl is an implementation of the Lua parser, compiler, and runtime, written in pure Erlang. It allows Lua programs to be executed on the BEAM in a fully sandboxed environment while allowing integrators to expose Erlang and Elixir functions directly to Lua programs.

In this talk, Robert Virding will give an overview of Lua and the Luerl implementation discussing some of the issues which arise and how they are solved and the added power they can give. We will cover a brief history of Lua, what makes Luerl unique, and how it executes Lua code.

To demonstrate how Luerl can be used in real products, Dave Lucia will showcase how his company, TV Labs, uses Lua to provide a customer-facing scripting interface for testing Smart TV applications. Using TV Labs, Dave will spin up a physical television in his web browser, navigate through a Smart TV app, take screenshots, and perform computer vision tasks, all within the Lua environment.

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rvirding · May 22, 2025, 9:57pm

Dave has written some more on the Elixir interface to Luerl, Lua.