Lua to Luau conversion guide

The Ultimate Guide to Gideros Studio

Gideros 2022.1 changed the interpreter from the Gideros flavour of Lua to the Gideros flavour of Luau:

Luau (lowercase u, /ˈlu.aʊ/) is a fast, small, safe, gradually typed embeddable scripting language derived from Lua. See: https://luau-lang.org/

Unlike regular Luau, Gideros Luau has the custom operators (bitwise, larger, smaller, trigonometry and integer divide) and easier syntax for arrays that you are used to with Gideros Lua.

However there are some slight differences between new Gideros Luau and old Gideros Lua.

Macros are no longer present, you will need to change macro constants to variables

e.g.

maxLives@5

change to:

maxLives=5

Automatic 'arg' variable in variadic argument functions is no longer available

Preferred and lua compatible way is to declare it yourself:

function foo(...)
	local arg = {...}
end

string.gfind was removed, use string.gmatch instead

e.g.

for char in string.gfind("ABC", "([%z\1-\127\194-\244][\128-\191]*)") do

change to:

for char in string.gmatch("ABC", "([%z\1-\127\194-\244][\128-\191]*)") do print(char) end

string.gsub patterns act slightly different when replacing a character that is special, you need to remove the second %

e.g.

string.gsub(myString,"%+","%-")

change to:

string.gsub(myString,"%+","-")

Lua shaders need to have a slight change to the way they are defined

e.g.

function vertex(vVertex,vColor,vTexCoord)

change to:

function vertex(vVertex,vColor,vTexCoord):Shader

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