> without a doubt 64-bit integers is a win I'm not so sure about that. There is an alternative implementation of Lua called LuaJIT, which uses a similar NaN-t

> without a doubt 64-bit integers is a win I'm not so sure about that. There is an alternative implementation of Lua called LuaJIT, which uses a similar NaN-tagging trick, and it also happens to be incredibly fast. LuaJIT uses the 5.1 version of the language, with some backported 5.2 features for compatibility, but it will likely never backport 64-bit integers from 5.3. It's resulted in something like the Python 2/3 split. Except it's even worse because Lua has relatively little penetration as a general purpose scripting language, but is quite popular as a language that can be embedded in a program to add scripting capabilities. This means it's up to the developer of said program which version of Lua they choose to embed, and from what I can tell, most developers choose speed over 64-bit integer support.