s/99/89/ :) I would not be so radical about Lua not being fit for general purpose use. Historically turning Lua into a general purpose language has been the go

s/99/89/ :) I would not be so radical about Lua not being fit for general purpose use. Historically turning Lua into a general purpose language has been the goal of the whole Kepler project. Whether they succeeded or not is a valid question... And now with LuaJIT there is a clear incentive to use Lua as a general purpose language: it is the fastest dynamic language available. At my previous company we used a lot of LuaJIT on the backend, and I would say it is very doable with the help of a few popular libraries (Penlight + LuaSocket is a good base). The FFI helps a lot too (and makes it an incredible glue language: you don't even have to write bindings anymore). I still think Lua is not the best language to write Web applications. We used Python and the Pocoo stack (Flask...) and there is nothing so advanced in Lua (yet?), although frameworks like Lapis have to be considered. But for other things Lua(JIT) is a very decent standalone language. Note: I don't know if everyone realizes this or not but OpenResty is an embedded use case. You are running within nginx.