Honestly, I'm not worried about the batteries. Thanks to FFI, you can just talk to libc, and vendor any native Lua code you need. (That's my approach for LÖVE.)

Honestly, I'm not worried about the batteries. Thanks to FFI, you can just talk to libc, and vendor any native Lua code you need. (That's my approach for LÖVE.) LuaJIT, release-wise, has been stuck in a very weird spot for a long time, before officially announcing it's now a "rolling release" - which was making a lot of package maintainers anxious about shipping newer versions. It also seems like it's going to be forever stuck on the 5.1 revision of the language, while continuing to pick a few cherries from 5.2 and 5.3. It's nice to have a "boring" language, but most distros (certainly Alpine, Debian, NixOS) just ship each release branch between 5.1 and 5.4 anyway. No "whatever was master 3 years ago" lottery.