Originally published on my Patreon
Last week's Second Life platform updates were mainly focused on the new Firestorm streaming option, but a long-awaited update to its scripting language might be even more important:
SLua stands for Second Life Lua, a language based on Luau (originally developed by Roblox), extended to harness the full power of Second Life’s existing functions. Think of it as LSL’s more powerful, versatile new cousin—offering you more flexibility, cleaner syntax, and features that make coding dramatically simpler.
Emphasis mine, because it's not only relevant to the thousands of SL creators who use LSL, but the hundreds of thousands of Roblox creators versed in Luau.
Signal Linden (Bennett Goble), head Software Engineer at the company, tells me Roblox's Luau and Second Life's SLua are pretty close:
"It is the Luau virtual machine extended to work with Second Life," he tells me. "We've had to make changes to support the requirements of mobile agents (AKA moving between regions) which means changes to support serializing/deserializing the runtime state. To users, it is the same language, just with LSL functionality. So: the same events residents know from LSL, same functions, with subtle interoperability changes to the language."
This also opens up a new opportunity for scripters working in Roblox: