Lua is a pleasing language to work with, but only that, unfortunately. It has never caught on in desktop apps due to a lack of suitable GUI library bindings. It

Lua is a pleasing language to work with, but only that, unfortunately. It has never caught on in desktop apps due to a lack of suitable GUI library bindings. It never caught on in web apps thanks to a lack of suitable web frameworks. There are at least a dozen half-implemented or abandoned Lua GUI projects, including at least three Lua-to-Qt binding toolkits and one briefly maintained by PUC-Rio (where Lua originates). But the other day I wanted to write a simple GUI to support formatting documents with a certain LaTeX template, and I struggled to find one that could guarantee that my users would be able to run the software on their various OS platforms. There are even more half-working Lua web frameworks, including Lapis, Ophal, Orbit, Sailor, and Tir, three of which have had brief moments in the limelight as the "preferred" Lua framework. There are at least three projects that attempted to add types to Lua, and no less than six parallelism libraries. If you view it as a competitor to Python, Lua is a case study in open-source community mismanagement. There are five projects that attempt to solve every outstanding problem usually none of which has more than three regular contributors. There are many competing "Lua standard libraries", and after the falling out between Mike Pall and PUC and the controversial introduction of integers, there are four similar but distinct versions of the Lua language in common use: Lua 5.1, Lua 5.2, Lua 5.3, and LuaJIT 2. But if you view it as a research project, Lua has been incredibly fruitful and continues to be. Any organization with the critical mass required to maintain their own internal ecosystem can use Lua without ever noticing the disarray in the wider community, and many do. It's just... annoying... from the perspective of the US/European open-source crowd.