The problem is that LuaJIT is an engine without a transmission or steering or braking system (this is a tortured analogy). It makes sense for PUC-Lua to have no

The problem is that LuaJIT is an engine without a transmission or steering or braking system (this is a tortured analogy). It makes sense for PUC-Lua to have no standard library and focus on embeddability. It does not make sense for LuaJIT to do the same thing. LuaJIT's use case looks more like Torch -- scientific computing where a lot of stuff is written in C but you still need speed for the free-form parts and your target users are in a hurry -- and you need standard libraries for that. LuaJIT can compete with Go and C# on a speed basis, but not a usability basis. Yeah, the actual compiler could use a maintainer, but who looks at LuaJIT and thinks "clearly, the weak point is the compiler!"?