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> LuaJIT development has effectively halted ... never meant it had to be more than "good enough" outside it's core strengths

That's a wrong impression. Even the original author of LuaJIT still commits regularly and there are dozens of companies maintaining and using it in industrial scale applications, and there are a couple of forks which focus on specific use cases and are independently developed. Not to forget the hundreds of games using Lua as a scripting language.

> only supports Lua 5.1 (5.3 is current, 5.4 imminent).

Which is obviously enough for most people using it including me. I don't see any unique selling point which would force me to update to Lua 5.3 or higher.

> and all the other quirks (but also speed).

Well, do your research. LuaJIT is among the fastest JITs available (e.g. a factor ~1.5 faster in geometric mean than JS V8), but with a much smaller footprint.

2 comments

> 5.1 / 5.3 -- "don't see any unique selling point" -- "there are a couple of forks"

Doesn't that show that the actual users of Lua and the authors have drifted apart, and the former are not willing to commit to a hard fork or taking over development? Or both sides could come together to form a much-beloved committee. The curse of "good enough".

> quirks / fastest

I think you misunderstood: Yes, it is fast even without LuaJIT, and super easy to embed and integrate - which is why this slow fading away into the embedded only realm would be quite a shame.

But it is also "quirky", and adding some (optional, possibly slower) syntax sugar over it could make it more appealing. Sure, Lua-fans will argue that tables are better than anything, but for those who just want to transfer existing language knowledge are hard to convince, and setmetatable makes everything even weirder.

> the actual users of Lua and the authors have drifted apart

So what? It has an MIT license, and there are obviously different communities with different requirements.

> it is fast even without LuaJIT

Not really. The PUC Lua VM is even slower than Python (in geometric mean) according to https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... LuaJIT in interpreted (not JIT) mode is still four times faster than PUC Lua (see http://luajit.org/performance.html).

> this slow fading away into the embedded only realm would be quite a shame.

I assume you mean "embedded use in applications" (i.e. not embedded systems). That's exactly what Lua was designed and built for by its original authors. An that's how it is mostly used.

> adding some (optional, possibly slower) syntax sugar over it could make it more appealing

Lua can do surprisingly much for this lean and simple syntax. If instead you prefer a baroque, pretentious syntax like Python or TypeScript, and are obviously satisfied with Python's performance, you already have a well established solution. And as I've demonstrated e.g. with https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon you can replace Lua by a more complex language and still profit from the performance and leanness of LuaJIT.

For me the biggest things with newer luas would be things like the bitwise operators, 32bit numbers and utf8 support. I haven't played with 5.4 yet but the garbage collection changes look rather nice too for some of the embedded work i've done with lua

> biggest things with newer luas would be things like the bitwise operators, 32bit numbers

LuaJIT has that already.

> utf8 support

This is rudimentary. Easy to add an even better library to previous Lua versions.