Your complaints are mostly addressed in Lua 5.3 (64 bit integers, utf8 in stdlib, bitwise ops) & many would suggest you use LPeg if you're itching for non trivi

Your complaints are mostly addressed in Lua 5.3 (64 bit integers, utf8 in stdlib, bitwise ops) & many would suggest you use LPeg if you're itching for non trivial string manipulation Also the documentation provided by lua.org is quite accessible: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3 https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3 What I'd really like is stdlib to provide a Buffer type, as opposed to having to use a table of integers which then gets pushed into a string with chunked calls to string.char(table.unpack(buf, n, n+4096)) Example of what I'm complaining about: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/make.lua#L758 https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/make.lua#L758 So all said I don't disagree with you: Lua can fall short, it doesn't have the community other languages have built up, & the community it has is rather fractured. Like LuaJIT making 5.2 what most call Lua, but also that being an extension language it's hard to upgrade without losing compatibility, so projects like Redis can't upgrade without deprecating 5.2 for a 5.3 version & making some method to signal 5.3 & then eventually removing 5.2 while packaging both in the interim