There are real applications where the GC limitations aren't a problem, but LuaJIT's addressing limitations are. The one I've run into is using extremely large

There are real applications where the GC limitations aren't a problem, but LuaJIT's addressing limitations are. The one I've run into is using extremely large strings (hundreds of megabytes per string). I've encountered cases where LuaJIT runs out of memory, but standard Lua works fine (and is quite fast). So while Mike Pall may correct about the behavior of the GC, the implication that this means LuaJIT's addressing limitations aren't a problem in practice is not correct. Given LuaJIT's limitations (not just this, but also the more fundamental issue of portability), the defacto forking of the language is worrying...