The established center is still LuaRocks for packages. Around it, people use different layers depending on the ecosystem: OpenResty has its own runtime/server world, as we know Neovim has its plugin conventions, games often use LÖVE, embedded apps usually vendor or tightly control Lua themselves, and tools like hererocks/Nix/asdf/mise/etc... are often used to pin Lua/LuaJIT versions.

Lux is worth mentioning as a newer Lua package manager/project tool, and I see it as adjacent rather than a direct enemy. Since you can use moonstone for solving the environment lua interpreter, and lux for packages side-by-side.

Moonstone is trying to sit in a slightly different space: reproducible Lua-family project environments. So not “a new Lua VM,” but a manager for interpreters, lockfiles, native C module builds, ABI compatibility, isolated envs, and mixed-runtime repos (plus some personal additions that I would have loved, such as open internal communications for custom CLIs.)

The pain point I’m aiming at is: “this repo needs Lua 5.4, this benchmark needs LuaJIT/OpenResty, this example uses LÖVE, and native modules need to rebuild correctly when ABI changes, and want to preserve it all clean and tidy”

Lua did not have an answer like cargo for rust, or UV for python... Till now.

To give some context:

Moonstone is currently under heavy, messy(getting better with time), active development. As I build various Lua + Zig projects with it, API contracts, CLI routes + flags, and configurations are constantly shifting. Using AI co-authoring has been a bit of a survival mechanism to ensure the documentation doesn't fall completely out of sync with the codebase. That said, AI authored docs can definitely feel dry to the eye, and/or verbose. If you or anyone else would like to help prune, rewrite, or polish the documentation to make it read more naturally, I would be incredibly grateful for the help!

In every, single, new HN post.