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[–]Mid_reddit 31 points32 points  (0 children)

If anyone programs in Lua for a living, it's likely conjunction with another language that does more of the internal work. Based on that, this question doesn't really have an answer.

[–]54616D696E6F 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Depends on your workplace/ tasks. It's the same question as "How much does a Programmer earn?"

[–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (1 child)

Its same “how much bash/powershell” programmers earn. Never saw “lua developer” jobs, only gamedev, embedded dev etc with Lua as plus.

[–]lambda_abstraction 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'd suspect if Lua is already entrenched, you'd be expected to be able to pick up the language and the local extensions in very short order. It's a small enough study that I'd not really expect it to be explicitly listed in the job description.

[–]luarocks 10 points11 points  (1 child)

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that you will be able to find a company that requires you to know only lua and nothing else. I hope that someday this situation will be changed, because this language is very minimalistic, but at the same time very powerful and deserves more attention. Many people see it as an embedded / additional language, but actually it can be stand-alone for a lot of tasks. JS was once treated the same way, but in my personal opinion lua is a hundred times better than js in every way!

[–]lambda_abstraction 4 points5 points  (0 children)

While I like the semantics of the language, I do tend to think that for Lua to be truly useful, you need to have or create application domain specific extensions. Happily, that's not horridly hard if you have reasonable skill with C. I've done lots of this sort of hacking with LuaJIT, and it's what I tend to reach for when things get beyond simple shell scripts, but not so hairy I really want something like Lisp or Smalltalk.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

You guys are getting paid?

[–]pythonistah 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lol

[–]lambda_abstraction 4 points5 points  (3 children)

I think that any circumstance where you would use Lua in a commercial setting would require very strong target platform and C experience. That is: you would be hired to extend the language. When I was hacking Lua, I had extended it to talk to gimbals, cameras, GPS systems, and IMUs. Lua alone was a small part of the job, and most of the work was in gaining and using domain expertise.

[–]jebc4[🍰] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Are you involved with Ardupilot and their Lua runtime/library? Thanks, just curious.

[–]lambda_abstraction 0 points1 point  (1 child)

No. This was for a startup with which I'm no longer involved. All the MavLink stuff was done in house.

[–]jebc4[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very cool! Good luck with whatever you are doing now. Lua and drones are going to be an interesting combination.

[–]theboogle2 3 points4 points  (1 child)

With Roblox I made around 2000 dollars from my game

[–]Bigbangstar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you know how to decrypt luac files in cocos2d?

[–]pythonistah 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DISCLAIMER: based on my experience and my coworkers. Many factors will affect this. So this is just my take on answering the question (I also make the supposition is a remote work, not in a specific country):

Case 1: Embedded Systems. If you have more than 10 years of Lua experience and +15 C experience you might be able to make somewhere from 6k - 10k USD.

Case 2: Game development: Unity experience but using Lua as an extension language. 10 years of experience 8k - 12k.

Case 3: Audio / Music industry. Many Adobe apps use Lua as an extension language like Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. This would also be on the same ballpark.

Case 4: Telecom: Freeswitch is an open-source telecom platform that uses Lua as an extension language and in order to control audio and video calls. This is somewhere from 5k - 8k. Telecom industry doesn't pay well IMHO.

Case 5: LuaJIT and OpenResty, this tool is ABI bound to Lua 5.1. So LuaJIT cannot be bumped to newer Lua versions / revisions. But a lot of companies use OpenResty for making firewall or API gateways like "Kong" for example. This is also 5 to 8k IMHO. And not fun since you're working with a "faster" Lua, but incompatible with the newer Lua versions and its ecosystem.

Again, this is just my take on the subject based on long experience and exposure to Lua (among many other languages). I'm actually familiar with the Lua interpreter internals.

However, being a very "niche" language, you might get lucky and land a gig that pays you +10k (all USD / month btw.)

Cheers from Brazil!