Version history
Here is a chronology of the versions of Lua. The evolution of Lua is documented in a paper presented at HOPL III, the Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference, in 2007. See also its continuation published in 2025 in a journal. The source code and documentation for all releases of Lua are available in the download area.
The releases of Lua are numbered x.y.z, where x is the series, x.y is the version, and z is the release.
Different releases of the same version correspond to bug fixes. Different releases of the same version have the same reference manual, the same virtual machine, and are binary compatible (ABI compatible).
Different versions are really different. The API is likely to be a little different (but with compatibility switches), and there is no ABI compatibility: applications that embed Lua and C libraries for Lua must be recompiled. The virtual machine is also very likely to be different in a new version: Lua programs that have been precompiled for one version will not load in a different version.
Lua 5.5.0 was released on 22 Dec 2025. Its main new features are declarations for global variables, more compact arrays, new generational mode for garbage collection, and major garbage collections done incrementally.
Lua 5.4 was released on 29 Jun 2020. Its main new features are a new generational mode for garbage collection and const and to-be-closed variables.
The current release is Lua 5.4.8, released on 4 Jun 2025.
Lua 5.3 was released on 12 Jan 2015. Its main new features were integers, bitwise operators, a basic utf-8 library, and support for both 64-bit and 32-bit platforms.
The last release was Lua 5.3.6, released on 25 Sep 2020. There will be no further releases of Lua 5.3.
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