A lot of modules are pure Lua. They may depend on a few critical C libraries though. But with just LuaSocket, LuaFileSystem and maybe LPEG you can use most modu

A lot of modules are pure Lua. They may depend on a few critical C libraries though. But with just LuaSocket, LuaFileSystem and maybe LPEG you can use most modules. There are several ways to build those critical Lua modules statically, one being https://github.com/stevedonovan/luabuild https://github.com/stevedonovan/luabuild Even without those, it is not very hard to modify the makefiles to build statically. About the bloat: this is certainly true for some modules and not others. As I said in the talk, everybody uses Lua differently and nobody will use all the modules and tools available, but there is still some amount of code that can be shared. I mean: you could say exactly the same thing about C, and it still has a lot of libraries.