Introducing LUNIR, the Lua IR

Hello everyone, you might or might not know me from my past presence on this forum.

Today I'm making a thread about a large scale project that I'm working on, and I'm looking for contributors, this can benefit any and all people using Lua.

LUNIR is a project that I started with a few friends, its an acronym for Lua Universal Intermediate Representation, and a play on words for Lunar.

What is LUNIR?

LUNIR is an open source intermediate representation for Lua source code and bytecode.

It can represent Lua 5.x (5.0 to 5.4) & Luau  bytecode or source code

It's an intermediate for all relevant Lua versions that employs optimization and analysis at both the high and low level.

What can it do?

LUNIR has a wide range of application, it's generalization allows it to be very complex and useful in many scenarios.

Typically, when thinking of intermediate representations, you think of compilers, and while that applies to LUNIR, its scope is far larger.

You can use LUNIR to write a

• compiler          
• decompiler     
• optimizer         
• formatter        
• linter                
• obfuscator     
• deobfuscator
• transpiler       

(the transpiler part applies at the bytecode & source levels)

How do I use it?

Unfortunately, LUNIR is not stable.

The issue is that this project is very large and complex, myself and the 2-3 other contributors are simply not enough.

That is why I'm coming to this forum to recruit anyone that thinks this project would be useful to them.

If you're still interested, keep reading, here's how you can contribute to the development of something great.

Contributing

First, the project is written exclusively in Rust, if you don't know Rust that's okay, don't let that scare you away, your input is still important.

Not sure if you have what it takes? That's okay.

For anyone willing to contribute to the project, I have a simple test that you can take a shot at.

There's no wrong answers here, post your thoughts in a reply to this thread if you want to try it, and in ~2 days I'll update the thread with the answer.

If you don't feel like waiting for that, post your answer then send me a DM and I'll tell you what the answer is.

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If you were an optimizing compiler, would you optimize anything in this code? If so, what would you optimize?

local a = foo()
if a <= 0 then
    if a >= 1 then
        print("a")
    end

    print("b")
end