IIRC, lua was pretty much the first embeddable interpreter that had a memory footprint acceptable in games - both in absolute size (esp. not linking the compile

IIRC, lua was pretty much the first embeddable interpreter that had a memory footprint acceptable in games - both in absolute size (esp. not linking the compiler), and in terms of allocation patterns, as consoles tended to have small direct caches. I remember several attempts to ship with an existing language (eg: Python, Java). A couple did succeed, but at a large cost. It was however, pretty easy to sit down with a copy of Kernighan&Pike "The UNIX Programming Environment" and bang out a lightweight compiler/bytecode interpreter that did everything the game needed - keeping precious RAM for gameplay.