User blog comment:Grunny/Introducing Lua, for faster and more powerful templates/@comment-24842353-20140611155833/@comment--20140611175242

To make it clear and make it official: Wikia is not doing away, removing, or otherwise hampering your ability to create templates in wikitext. Lua is an extra option for templating and it will at most be strongly recommended that communities convert complex templates over to Lua for performance and maintenance reasons. For example, a template that is passed a name and bolds it is not something we would really recommend be converted to Lua because the wikitext version is simple and has no notable performance implications. When you start looking at pages with things like  or nested   statements, that's where Lua makes sense. Those statements are syntactically shorter and easier to code (no more counting curly brackets to make sure it balances out right!) and have massive performance gains because the logic parser is native.