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

Hi Rett,

Thanks for reaching out! The Civboot project sounds fascinating. A simpler
2D-to-extrude kernel is a very pragmatic approach for manufacturing, and I
think you could do a lot with it.

Regarding the implementation: I modified the Lua source code directly to
introduce those breaking changes, like local-by-default and boolean
strictness. Because of those fundamental shifts, I suspect a direct
package.searchers integration wouldn't work seamlessly right now.

While backward compatibility wasn't a primary goal for Luam, the delta
isn't massive, so it would be pretty easy to translate the luametry logic
back to standard Lua for importability. I’m definitely open to discussing
how that could work.

I’d love to dive deeper into this with you. Feel free to reach out at
[email protected] and we can chat more!

Best,
Ben

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026, 07:39 Rett Berg, <[email protected]> wrote:

> This is a really cool project. I have plans to try and build something
> similar for civboot.org - albeit with a simpler kernel (likely 2D only
> with extrude), which I think you could do quite a lot with in terms of
> manufacturing. I'd love to chat about it (off the list) if that is
> something which would interest you.
>
> Are you compiling luam to lua (either bytecode or syntax)? If you are (or
> could), you could consider implementing it as a library which adds itself
> to the package.searchers, documented under require
> <https://www.lua.org/manual/5.5/manual.html#6.4>. This would allow lua
> modules to import luam and vice-versa.
>
> Best,
> Rett
>
> On Saturday, February 14, 2026 at 5:22:29 PM UTC-7 Ben Sivan wrote:
>
>> Hi Martin,
>>
>> Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad the "Local by default" and "Boolean
>> strictness" resonate with you.
>>
>> Regarding multiline comments, it is not a hill to die on. Removing them
>> was mostly an exercise in seeing how far I could minimize the syntax. Since
>> the lexer handles triple-quoted strings anyway, I can easily reconsider, if
>> it becomes a nuisance.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Ben
>>
>> On Sat, 14 Feb 2026, 12:02 'Martin Eden' via lua-l, <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2026-02-14 15:49, Ben Sivan wrote:
>>> > Hello everyone,
>>> >
>>> > [...]
>>> >
>>> > 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.
>>> Hello Ben, I think it's nice project
>>>
>>> Points where I agree (and don't use in my code anyway):
>>>
>>> * No metatables
>>> * nil is not boolean
>>> * Local by default
>>>
>>> I have no opinion about "enhanced REPL", don't use it much.
>>>
>>> But decision to remove multiline comments looks strange to me.
>>>
>>> If you allow multiline strings why forbid multiline comments?
>>> They are actually fine, in last ten years I'm moving to block comments
>>> describing what following block of code does.
>>>
>>> -- Martin
>>>
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