I think it has more to do with how his runtime performs. :) Tuning Lua code really isn't that hard, the language is tiny and has both semantics and performance

I think it has more to do with how his runtime performs. :) Tuning Lua code really isn't that hard, the language is tiny and has both semantics and performance characteristics that are easy to reason about accurately. There's a good sample chapter from _Lua Programming Gems_ on Lua performance tuning (http://www.lua.org/gems/sample.pdf http://www.lua.org/gems/sample.pdf), FWIW. That and a good profiler will get you far.