>>a style that was pretty alien to me. There is your real problem. A. C is a beautiful language. I believe a more productive attitude towards any usage of C -

>>a style that was pretty alien to me. There is your real problem. A. C is a beautiful language. I believe a more productive attitude towards any usage of C - as a binding/engine language layer, or whatever - is to assume: there is no one familiar style. (What Lua/src has, is good coding rules compliance..) B. You control the VM, completely. The Lua language is designed with the VM integrator in mind. Lua frameworks are not something you inherit. So .. Why does global name-spacing versus local definition bother you? Show me your offensive global/local case; in every single case, it can be solved with better design. At the very least, walk _G yourself. C/D. Its the 21-st Century, 1-based indexing makes sense to most of the non-hacker world, since you can't have a "0-th" box in which to store things in the real world. Except of course you can, you just make one and label it, arbitrarily, the '0' box .. in fact you do have the ability to index everything 0-based yourself in Lua, so have at it. Lua provides the 'one-type to rule all things' type, the Lua table{}, to give you the options you need. Want an array? Use your new_array{} as an array. Want a string-dictionary? Have at it. Need a hash: ditto. Bonus points: understand what you're doing, and get features from the table type; like scatter detection, packing/indexing/ordering operations, and so on. Lua metatables are your friend, not an enemy. Learn to use the table type and you will become a convert. E. C-side API. You do have to understand the design constraints of the VM. That's about all you have to do. Is that really so weird?