Lua's compiler adds very little overhead, compared to loading directly from luac's precompiled bytecode. It has a really fast, single pass compiler, which is op

Lua's compiler adds very little overhead, compared to loading directly from luac's precompiled bytecode. It has a really fast, single pass compiler, which is optimized for reading in data serialized as Lua tables. Lua was designed with JSON-like use cases in mind. Its compiler doesn't do much analysis / optimization, but the performance of individual Lua constructs is usually easy to reason about.