To be fair, when I was using Lua a decade ago, LuaJIT mostly only supported Linux and x86-64. Mike was adding new architectures and variants on request and when

To be fair, when I was using Lua a decade ago, LuaJIT mostly only supported Linux and x86-64. Mike was adding new architectures and variants on request and when people would pay him to do so, while the core was both mostly sufficient and still improving. Those 50,000 lines did come after x86-64, if you wanted to move the project in a different direction it seems sensible to strip them out, make your changes. As long as your changes a rent too drastic, it should be comparatively easy to put them back in.