Yeah my experience as well. I've worked in lua for years and nearly every codebase has a home grown, often incomplete or fairly bad implementation of a json par

Yeah my experience as well. I've worked in lua for years and nearly every codebase has a home grown, often incomplete or fairly bad implementation of a json parser, csv writer, rgb converter, templating engine, etc. Only old-school php rivals it in this. And for some reason this language seems to provoke people into writing custom build systems. A huge number of lua projects have them. In practice make can be pretty bad too but at least it's bad in familiar ways.