LÖVE

Hello, I'm a pretty new developer in the Lua ecosystem, and I was wondering if there was any cons to using LOVE as oppose to just Vanilla Lua(is that a term people use?)

I suppose the reason I'm not using LOVE for my first projects is because it's hard for me to get it on my Chromebook without having to install Linux and potentially breaking the system. I can easily use an online IDE for programming in Lua, but installing a framework is a bit more tricky...

If anyone could provide a master list on why you should and should not develop with LOVE, that would be appreciated.

LOVE (hehe)
- Jojo

Hi and welcome to the forums;

Vanilla lua could be an acceptable term if you just want to mean "some kind of lua, but not any external libs and stuff", although people can also use "PUC lua" for the more or less official interpreter version that comes from the creator (and/or his university), or something like that, and luaJIT, if they are specifically refferring to mike pall's compiler.

Löve makes it easier to create graphical applications, and more specifically (but not exclusively), games, with lua used as the programming language. Since Löve uses luaJIT by default, it isn't lacking in processing speed, which is a good thing.
Löve also handles windowing, event handling, and a few other things through SDL2,filesystem access through PhysFS, graphics through OpenGL, and audio through OpenAL(Soft). It also includes a few other things like sockets and enet for networking (and possibly Inter-Process Communications, as well), and can create true threads to utilize more CPU cores (with some limitations).

Löve supports a somewhat wide array of platforms, all three major PC OS-es (Win, OSX, Linux) as well as Android and iOS handhelds; there are also ports being made for the 3DS and browsers through js, i believe.

If you don't want to use löve, you'll have to go the extra mile of coding tons of scaffolding code to get features the framework already has, which is not always a bad thing; depends on a person's type, to be honest. That said, löve also doesn't come with "all batteries included", in terms of bigger engines like Unity or just Game Maker; it doesn't exactly support 3D stuff (although it can be made to do so, thanks to luaJIT), it doesn't have a Scene manager / Node graphs, and some other things; then again, differences between engines and frameworks are as such.

It really should be up to you to decide what you wish to do.

Love2D uses LuaJIT which is a fork of Lua.
Vanilla Lua is slower but may have new language features not available in LuaJIT.

If what you want is making games with Lua, vanilla Lua without any external frameworks/libraries won't suffice. LOVE is one of the frameworks/libraries that you can use to make games, and a good one.