Lua's weak point is around doing things with arrays, IME. It's just not very fast when you actually need something simple. I actually started poking around at

Lua's weak point is around doing things with arrays, IME. It's just not very fast when you actually need something simple. I actually started poking around at a language design over the past month that tries to leverage Lua as the compiler for something that can run in its own separate bytecode interpreter, with more of an emphasis on low level primitives. It started off as a simple adaptation of Forth ideas, but yesterday I started playing with a revision that shifts the data structure from plain old stack towards growable arrays containing three cursors(thus, "tricursor array") which can be purposed to describe bounds, destinations, insertion points, read and write, top of stack, etc. In Forth the top three values of the stack tend to get dedicated words for their manipulation because they are used quite often; this model runs with that idea plus methods I've often used for array data(text edits, sound sample loops, blotting sprites) and tries to extrapolate that into a language that can ease certain forms of array programming, while falling back on using the array as a data stack. Still just sketching it now.