When comparing PHP vs Lua, the Slant community recommends Lua for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?”Lua is ranked 16th while PHP is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Lua is:

One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game.
Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages.

One of the most common languages

Pro

Lots of tutorials online

Pro

Used by most common CMS platforms

Many clients are looking for an easy-to-update web site that's flexible and free. Drupal and Wordpress fill those needs very well.

Pro

Most prominent language for web applications

Part of the de facto standard web application stack.

Pro

Great third-party package manager

PHP standard library is somewhat subpar, but if you need plugins, language features, composer has them all( you can even puzzle together a custom framework from composer).

Pro

Fast

Since 7.x was released, PHP has become a pretty fast language.

Pro

Lots of PHP frameworks available which help with development

PHP people love frameworks, and with frameworks such as Laravel, you can build a web app or API really fast (Facades, ORMs, scaffolding etc.)

Pro

Great documentation

Pro

Very easy to integrate with C and C++

One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game.

Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages.

Pro

Great documentation

The official Lua documentation is very helpful and thorough. There are also a large number of online resources or books with lots of helpful information for beginners and advanced users alike.

Pro

Portable

Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler.

Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation).

When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K.

The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers.

Pro

Fast

Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can:

Implement critical parts in C

Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page:

LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C.

Pro

Simple

Easy to learn.

Pro

Embeddable

Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use.

Pro

Helpful community

Due to the growing popularity, Lua has a rather large and helpful community surrounding it.

Pro

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming.

The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics:

Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)).

Cons

Con

Poorly designed language

Despite its widespread use, PHP is generally looked upon poorly from a design point of view. The consistency of function names and function argument order, lazily and borderline non-functional implementation of object oriented programming, can only receive requests via POST methods, slow version adoption (the PHP you learn right now may not work on every webserver you'll work on), and a focus on "hacking things together" rather than "doing it right". These are all very common complaints when it comes to working with PHP. While not a bad language to learn, PHP is not at all a good language to learn first, as it will probably teach bad habits.

Con

Most tutorials are out of date

A lot of very bad tutorials are still widely circulated among beginners, and these tutorials teach very poor programming practices.

Con

Immense catalog of insecure frameworks

The most serious security problems in websites on the web today are almost universally found in popular PHP frameworks, CMS platforms, libraries and code samples, almost all stemming from poor language design, bad tutorials and awful resources.

Con

Most resources are poorly-written

Few resources exemplify the "correct" or secure use of features.

Con

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs.

Con

Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages

Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages.

Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages.

Con

Batteries not included

Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight.

Ad

Alternative Products

Each month, over 1.7 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.