[ANN] Luam: A minimalist, procedural Lua dialect for CAD (Luametry)‏

Hello everyone,

I’ve been working on a project called *Luam*, a dialect of Lua designed for
high-performance procedural workflows. To demonstrate its utility, I’ve
built *Luametry*, a parametric CAD tool that leverages the Manifold library
for 3D geometry generation.

As a long-time admirer of Lua’s minimalism, my goal with Luam was to
further constrain the language for a specific domain. In many ways, Luam is
a "subtractive" dialect; I found that by removing certain features and
standardizing others, I could create a more predictable environment for 3D
modeling.

Key design choices in *Luam* include:

   -

   *Strict Procedural API:* I have removed standard OOP features and
   metatable-based "classes" to enforce a consistent, flat procedural style
   that maps cleanly to the underlying C++ geometry engine.
   -

   *Boolean Strictness:* To eliminate ambiguity in complex CAD logic, I’ve
   removed nil as a truthy/falsy value in conditionals, requiring explicit
   boolean evaluations.
   -

   *Syntactic Simplification:* I’ve removed multiline comments to keep the
   lexer and scripts as simple as possible, while adding modern multiline
   string support for data embedding.
   -

   *Local by Default:* To prevent accidental global state leakage in
   large-scale procedural assemblies, variables are scoped locally by default.
   -

   *Enhanced REPL:* Improved the interactive experience with native cursor
   navigation and line editing, moving away from the standard ^D character
   echoes.

The intent is to provide a "safety-first" environment for users focused on
generating 3D data, where the side effects of global variables or complex
object hierarchies can lead to unexpected geometry errors.

I would be very interested to hear the community’s thoughts on this
approach to domain-specific simplification.

*Luam Core:* https://github.com/BenSiv/luam
<https://www.google.com/search?q=https://github.com/BenSiv/luam>

*Luametry (CAD implementation):* https://github.com/BenSiv/luametry

Thank you to the Lua team and this community for providing such an elegant
foundation.

Best regards,

Ben Sivan

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