I wanted to have just faster dynamic lang. Common lisp is there, but the performant implementations are heavy. CFFI is well developed, and systems like Lispwork

I wanted to have just faster dynamic lang. Common lisp is there, but the performant implementations are heavy. CFFI is well developed, and systems like Lispworks allow you to create a dll with "C" entry point (but it's commercial and costs some money) javascript's v8 was my next choice, but then found about luajit and using it since. The jit and the ffi are very good selling points. Also the small size of the project, and very fast recompile time (unlike say pypy) I've used lua back in 2001, 2002 as a testing facility for a library I did at work.