The implementation of the Lua and now LuaJIT2 VMs are part of the reason for the language success. It's had good performance and low memory overhead for almost

The implementation of the Lua and now LuaJIT2 VMs are part of the reason for the language success. It's had good performance and low memory overhead for almost two decades (the incremental gc came in 2006). Javascript has only been coming to age recently.