Ah I see that! I’ve actually seen these names before, I don’t know where though. Probably from @einsteinK
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Yeah. I believe he just ported them into roblox and made a module to handle the process. Their authors should still have all of their credits and comments in each module. Originally it was using LuLu to interpret, then was switched to LBI, and now it’s using Rerubi.
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The original code for bytecode compilation comes from a project called Yueliang which can be found here.
I believe @einsteinK, @stravant and @cntkillme were the original people that got this working on Roblox initially, it’s pretty interesting to see how much work has been done on this since then. I remember looking at how hard it would be to get LuLu working on Roblox many years ago and it seemed really inaccessible to me but they made it happen.
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Oh that’s awesome! I just sliced the loadstring module and stuck a script to its calling environment to test it. It worked.
Now I’m going to spend the next 6 years trying to understand it all.
Not for long probably – I’ve been working on and off on a more compact compiler out of boredom. 
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@TheGamer101 @Sceleratis I don’t believe I ever published a full bytecode interpreter (Though I’ve published so many Lua related tools I wouldn’t be surprised if I actually had. Though I didn’t write them, LBI and some of the other tools definitely have some chunks of code that smell strongly of being copied out of something I did write style-wise).
I think my primary contribution in that area was probably this, the LASM tools ca. 2010, which can easily act as an intermediary layer for someone trying to experiment with / write that sort of stuff. As a baseline they provide a working reference implementation of decoding binary Lua chunks using only vanilla Lua.
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I’d appreciate it if you could clarify as to who to properly credit in the original writing of the LBI, which was the base concept for Rerubi.
I was sorta out in the blue about it so…
I think stravant (and some other people?) is the best you can do. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that at least some of the parts of the code are copied out of something I did write, but also pretty sure I didn’t write the main piece of code.
8 years and hundreds of programming projects later I can’t really remember what all I did on that topic. I know I wrote LASM and a couple of other tools, but I can’t find the other ones.
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I’ve started several small projects to parse and/or execute a language. The LBI port @Sceleratis mentioned was just something I ported early on and adapted a bit to work with roblox instances and such.
Right now, I have a module (that I use in script builders now and then) that uses @stravant’s Lua-to-AST module (which I got from his Minify/Beautify plugin) that converts the Lua to kind of a table format. My “VM” just “executes” the table. Not the most efficient way, but it was fun to create and relatively easy to study/modify/… I think I added some very small modifications to stravant’s module to fix a bug with locals, but it’s been a while, so can’t remember
Originally, EISS/Adonis still used the Lua VM that I ported, which was LuLu I think. @Rerumu just made a better VM, so @Sceleratis replaced the VM part with reru’s thing. I remember looking for a weird bug in the VM for an hour, finally fixing it, wanting to make a pull request for it on the github, finding out there was already an issue (with fix) logged… oh well
fun times
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Sounds interesting. A lot of fun but I don’t really understand about 90% of that sort of stuff. 
So does this mean you can create a program to execute javascript in a script or something? That would be really cool. Of course the js code would be a multi-line string in a script which is parsed through the VM.
Just an idea/query.
It’s possible.
Back in my earlier fun days I made a couple assembly-like languages for fun and to start understanding how parsing and interpreting worked. You can do it with just about any language you can imagine, although it does take some time to get working.
Has someone already made an interpreter for other languages on this site, to your knowledge?
Apparently @einsteinK has, or so he has told me. Besides that, I don’t know of any others. It’s not an often explored part of Lua on here.
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I tried to port the Fantom language to Roblox Lua at one point. I got much further than the Model suggests, I actually had a partially working code generator that output to Lua Bytecode, which is one of the things that I made the LASM assembler for in the first place. I gave up on that after Roblox removed the ability to loadstring binary chunks.
Side note, Fantom is one of my favorite obscure programming languages. Its serialized-constructor syntax is actually where I got the idea for the the create"ClassName"{member = value} construct I introduced on Roblox.
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There’s a lot of fun to be had in this area, but it often doesn’t serve much of a purpose on Roblox (unless you’re going for maximum code obfuscation). Nonetheless, I’ve been working on a C-like port, but with how lazy I am to work on things it’ll probably take a while.
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I’ve done some things like parsing respawn and teleport reru and strav to me which would respawn Rerumu/Stravant and teleport them to me. Not really a programming language, but still parser-related, so eh.
I was working on “porting” Java to roblox. I posted about it in the 2016 “what are you working on” thread:
What are you working on currently? [2016] - #2715 by einsteinK
What are you working on currently? [2016] - #2727 by einsteinK
Never finished it, but it could run this code:
package testing;
native NativeTest {
print("hi",...)
}
public class Banana {
private static String testString = "hi";
private static a.b.c.Test idk = new a.b.c.Test(testString);
public static Banana test;
private static Banana test2;
public Banana(){}
private static void APPLE(){
Integer a = 1;
print("a:",a);
int b = 2;
a += 5;
test2 = new Banana();
NativeTest(a,b+a,test2.toString());
}
}
local res = Compiler.compile(ABOVE_CODE)
local VM = require(script:WaitForChild("VM"))
local class,thread = VM:LoadClass(res,res.classes["testing.Banana"])
local res = VM:InvokeStaticWithoutArguments(class,"APPLE",thread)
if res.success then
print("Result:",res.result)
else
print("Error:",res.information)
end
--[[
Error: Workspace.Lurova.VM:591: Can't cast this primitive to lurova.util.String
--> NativeTest(a,b+a,test2.toString());
Stack begin
Method 'testing.Banana.APPLE()', Line 19
Stack end
--]]
I forgot what I was last working on, so I’m not sure why it errors, but similar pieces of code work fine. I had a class registry, a compiler that converts to a table format (some kind of self-made AST) and of course a VM that could execute the table format.
As you can tell, I also added some “native” stuff, which basically allowed embedding (real) Lua functions, which would obviously be faster than running stuff in the VM. I’m pretty sure I also allowed something like native String NativeTest(String a) {}, but too long ago to be sure. EDIT: Took a quick glance at the source code, as I wasn’t entirely sure, but it seems like native (static) class methods were also supported, so very fun.
one of my many projects I started and are now… “suspended”
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Looks very interesting!
@Sceleratis @Rerumu Does the loadstring module work to allow a local environment for ls commands? If so, how does one enable that? <3
The last few lines in the source contains the function that handles actual wrapping; it takes 2 arguments: the bytecode, and the table used for the environment in which it’ll run.
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