I once worked on a project at a FAANG where we had to run an app on a 600Mhz CPU with no FPU. Javascript (v8, spidermonkey) wouldn't cut it (for some reasons fu

I once worked on a project at a FAANG where we had to run an app on a 600Mhz CPU with no FPU. Javascript (v8, spidermonkey) wouldn't cut it (for some reasons function calls where very slow amongst other things). While Lua was incredibly fast on that hardware and the VM footprint was also a blessing. Even better, we could send a binary blob of the Lua VM/app state over the wire, and so we could precompute the whole app start on a server and send that to the device (the app would start in under 5 secondes instead of minutes as it would just load the blob). Best hacking time of my career, thanks to Lua.