a/README.md

a

A Swiss army knife for everyday hacks. a embeds a Lua interpreter and wraps it in a rich standard library and real IO access, so a small script can reach the network, a database, the filesystem, and the terminal without any setup.

a file.lua

That's the whole interface. The script is the program.

What it is

a is not a Lua implementation; it embeds Lua 5.5 (via mlua) and adds the parts stock Lua leaves out. Plain Lua is small and pleasant but ships almost no standard library and no way to talk to the outside world without C modules and a build toolchain. a fills that in with a standard library built partly in Rust and partly in Lua, plus the IO access that makes scripts actually useful.

The result is a single binary you point at a .lua file. No package manager, no build step, no project scaffolding, just a script and the tools it needs to do real work.

The standard library

This is the point of a. Planned surface:

• Networking — HTTP client, WebSocket, and MQTT (3.1.1 and 5), with high-level APIs.
• SQLite — a real embedded database one call away.
• Filesystem — ergonomic read/write/glob/walk, without the ceremony of stock Lua's io.
• Terminal UI — interactive line and full-screen TUI in the spirit of ncurses, but without the awkwardness.

Each should feel native: the common case is one obvious call, not a setup ritual.

How it works

• Embeds Lua 5.5 via mlua, on an async core (tokio) so IO-heavy scripts don't block.
• A single self-contained binary. No LuaRocks, no make, no virtualenv.
• Scripts run in a sandboxed environment modeled on Luau's safe environment: io, package, and debug are not loaded; os is trimmed to its time functions; the bytecode/chunk-loading escape hatches (load, loadfile, dofile, string.dump) are removed. The library a provides is the sanctioned way to reach the outside world.
• A leading #! shebang line is skipped, so scripts can be made executable directly.

Building

cargo build --release
# binary at target/release/a

cargo run -- lua/test.lua   # run a script during development

Requires a Rust toolchain (2024 edition). Lua is vendored and built from source, so no system Lua is needed.