**This is an old revision of the document!**
Lua
There are 2 “branches:” of Lua now for ESP8266, and both are now open source. Confusingly, both use the word Node in their name - NodeLua and NodeMcu!
As lua.org says, Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics.
Lua is small: the Lua interpreter easily fits in under 100 kilobytes including the base libraries.
Lua is fast: independent benchmarks show that Lua is often amongst the fastest interpreted dynamic languages. The Lua interpreter has been extensively tuned for high performance.
NodeMCU
NodeMCU - Initially this was closed source, but was released to open-source in October 2014. This firmware is based on the
eLua plafrom and migrated to the ESP8266 and SDK.It is under active development by esp8266 open source community. It helps you to prototype your IOT product within a few Lua script lines.
NodeLua