Lua *

I don't know about you, but I really like to get inside all sorts of systems. In this article, I’m going to tell you about the internals of Lua tables and special considerations for their use. Lua is my primary professional programming language, and if one wants to write good code, one needs at least to peek behind the curtain. If you are curious, follow me.

In 2017, we won the competition for the development of the transaction core for Alfa-Bank's investment business and started working at once. (Vladimir Drynkin, Development Team Lead for Alfa-Bank's Investment Business Transaction Core, spoke about the investment business core at HighLoad++ 2018.) This system was supposed to aggregate transaction data in different formats from various sources, unify the data, save it, and provide access to it.

In the process of development, the system evolved and extended its functions. At some point, we realized that we created something much more than just application software designed for a well-defined scope of tasks: we created a system for building distributed applications with persistent storage. Our experience served as a basis for the new product, Tarantool Data Grid (TDG).

I want to talk about TDG architecture and the solutions that we worked out during the development. I will introduce the basic functions and show how our product could become the basis for building turnkey solutions.

On the first Sunday of March, Mail.ru Group’s Moscow office will be hosting the third international Lua conference, Lua in Moscow 2019. The program features talks by Roberto Ierusalimschy and the leading experts in Lua and LuaJIT from Russia and other countries.

Lua is a unique programming language used not only in computer games, but also as an embedded language in such web-programming products as Redis, nginx, Tarantool, OpenResty. Lua is also used for big data analysis and scientific calculations. You can find Lua in many routers, printers and other devices.

You are welcome to join, even if you haven’t been writing in Lua so far. We bet the conference will give you unexpected insights!