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From PHP to Lua

A minor tech announcement for Mix’n’match:

Code fragments for Mix’n’match catalogs are switching from PHP to Lua. User-supplied PHP is not secure enough, and will not scale for future development. I have converted many code fragments from PHP to Lua already, and new code fragments have to be Lua.

Lua is not exactly my favorite language, but it has a sweet spot between the number of people who know it or can easily learn it, and safety/resource usage etc. for letting user-written code run within Mix’n’match/Toolforge.

PHP code that was not “translated” yet will be supported for a while, but not forever. Existing PHP code will be shown as a “hint” for Lua, for the time being.

Example: https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/code/7098

This was written by Magnus. Posted on Thursday, April 16, 2026, at 16:23. Filed under Wikimedia. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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  1. The Whelming › Less mixing, more matching on Thursday, April 23, 2026 at 09:57

    […] extract birth and death dates from entry descriptions for a specific catalog. As you can see in my recent blog entry, I am now offering Lua instead, but keep the legacy PHP code around, for comparison […]