I think you might be missing the point that he's trying to make, which is that having the Lua VM is one thing, and great and everything, but you do still need s

I think you might be missing the point that he's trying to make, which is that having the Lua VM is one thing, and great and everything, but you do still need some interface to the raw devices - input/output - to make use of it in any sense. You can't build a user-application with the basic Lua VM in any fashion other than as a command line tool. If you want more sophisticated GUI, you do have to wrap it somehow to get this working in the context of the Lua VM. (Disclaimer: I'm currently developing professionally using the MOAI toolkit..) There are plenty of solutions to the problem of not having a GUI/user-interaction built-in, of course - you can emit .png files, or you could get raw framebuffer support somehow, or you could even interface to the native GUI .. but all of this has to be done extra, its not something that works, out of the box, with the basic Lua VM ..