I really do understand the desires people have for iOS to be a more open platform, but I'm just gonna say very clearly: I do not want third party apps being able to do what OP's app does. My iPhone is the one computing platform I have where I get the assurance that no third party app can be spying on anything else I do on the device.
I expect that is possible, but the specific choice of JavaScript is because Apple ships a framework that bridges types very nicely between native and JS. It's used by WebKit, so it works really well and is very unlikely to disappear.
That means the core of Hammerspoon goes from being incredibly complicated, to really just a protocol conformance.
Mostly the former, but the latter is also attractive. Once I got the basic core working and a couple of modules implemented, I had Claude build me a script that extracts type information and method signatures, to automatically build a TypeScript definition file.
I have a feeling that letting people do what Hammerspoon can do, but in a TypeScript environment that they're much more likely to know, than Lua, will be huge for the project.
Really there's very little that v2 might do, that v1 couldn't. This is almost all about me not wanting to maintain a big pile of Objective C and Lua anymore. I want to be working in Swift, and rather than maintain our own type bridging to/from Lua, we can get that for free from Apple's JavaScriptCore framework.
Beyond my enjoyment/productivity on the developer side though, I think v2 will be a big boost to user enjoyment/productivity, mostly because they'll be able to get much nicer IDE integrations for their config file, and be able to do things like write their config in TypeScript.
Not really any more or less than in v1 - which is to say that it's possible to execute those scripts from Hammerspoon, but there's no rich bridging between them.
The limitation is entirely on the developer side - for years now there have only really been three of us working on Hammerspoon with any regularity, and that has been significantly dwindling down to mostly just me and Chris Hocking.
Honestly, in 2026, I do not want to be maintaining a 100k line Objective C program.
So, my current experimentation with a v2 is to see how easily I can catch up with where v1 is, just using Swift and JavaScriptCore.
There are lots of things about the Lua APIs that I don't like, and I'm addressing some of those as I go, but I'm currently in a phase where I'm targeting parity with everything I need for my v1 config, at which point I can cut over to running v2 and then see how things are looking and what can be refined/reworked.
I'll happily agree that JavaScript is not a very nice language, but to be honest, I don't think Lua is a very nice language either. It's easy to embed in C though, which is why we were able to do all of the things that Hammerspoon does.
Where JS massively wins here, to my mind, is that there is so much tooling available for it, to the point that I'm already not actually writing my v2 config in JS at all, I'm writing it in TypeScript and compiling it to JS.
The simple answer is not having to maintain a really complicated language bridge anymore.
The more complex answer is that Hammerspoon is currently about 100k lines of Objective C, and none of us really want to work on it anymore when Swift is the much nicer place to be doing macOS development.
Technically we could slowly convert in-place from ObjC to Swift, but there will always be a need for "LuaSkin", the bridging code we've accumulated over the last 13+ years, and rewriting that in Swift would be significantly complicated.
JavaScript, however, is already bridged for us because WebKit needs it.
Hammerspoon maintainer here - I'm enjoying reading all the comments, and hoping that everyone isn't going to be annoyed that I'm mostly working on a v2 atm, which switches from Lua to JavaScript :D
Space doesn't really change it though because the effective bandwidth between nodes is reduced by the overall size of the network and how much data they need to relay between each other.
When you absolutely, positively, must find a nice thing to say about Tesla, yes, their 11% revenue decline - their second year in a row of revenue decline, was indeed slightly less bad than analysts expected...
The experience is what you make of it. Personally I'm quite enjoying using AI as a way to generate code I can disagree with and refactor into what I want.