I can see where you are coming from. Just $0.02 these issues don't bother me so much in my day-to-day usage over many years (though this is with LuaJIT/RaptorJI

I can see where you are coming from. Just $0.02 these issues don't bother me so much in my day-to-day usage over many years (though this is with LuaJIT/RaptorJIT so YMMV.) The default numeric type (double float) can precisely represent integers up to 2^53. That's ample for most of my purposes. You can even fit x86-64 pointers into them. Syntax doesn't match C but that doesn't bother me because I'm used to other languages already e.g. Erlang that uses different operators and one-based indexing. Bit operations are always there in LuaJIT. The C API does seem awkward to me too but it's superceded by the lovely FFI in LuaJIT.