Lua is a very simple yet very powerful language. I like to say it is the best of JavaScript without the warts of JavaScript. Lua is one of the best performing

Lua is a very simple yet very powerful language. I like to say it is the best of JavaScript without the warts of JavaScript. Lua is one of the best performing interpreted languages around. If you use LuaJIT, it competes well with the best JS jits. It also has a small memory footprint and reasonably controllable GC pauses. Lua is very easy to integrate into C/C++ projects. It is easy to write a debugger for Lua. Like everything else in Lua, debugging capabilities are libraries that can just as easily be invoked in Lua itself or in C. IMHO, very overlooked is that Lua is a batteries-optional language. It comes with a small standard library that keeps it's footprint and capabilities reasonable. If you want more, there are lots of open source libraries you can add. But, more importantly, almost all of the standard libs can be stripped out and Lua will still function just fine. Don't want your scripts to do file IO? Don't load the IO library.