The "bare-bones" nature of Lua is really nice when you need it, so I like that it's an option. But I would guess that most of the time you need Penlight [1], a

The "bare-bones" nature of Lua is really nice when you need it, so I like that it's an option. But I would guess that most of the time you need Penlight [1], and I found middleclass [2] to be a pretty good OO library. After that, just build some abstractions. It's very easy to build DSLs in Lua, or if that's a little too dynamic for you (it is for me), it's very easy to use patterns like Builder or use an OO library and build some class taxonomies. Anyway, Lua's not batteries included in lots of ways. It does take a little time to build it up for your specific usage. But most users think that's a core feature. [1]: https://stevedonovan.github.io/Penlight/api/index.html https://stevedonovan.github.io/Penlight/api/index.html [2]: https://github.com/kikito/middleclass https://github.com/kikito/middleclass