Also, Ruby has much more complicated rules for method dispatch. Lua just has functions, and if you want to implement any more complicated dispatch, you have to

Also, Ruby has much more complicated rules for method dispatch. Lua just has functions, and if you want to implement any more complicated dispatch, you have to do it yourself. Once I implemented Ruby-like dispatch on top of Lua, and it was terribly slow: http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/09/disappointment/ http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/09/disappointment/ To make a long story short, porting my existing Lua project to use my Ruby-like method dispatch resulted in a 4x slowdown.