- Dynamic typing for fast prototyping. The compiler is full of dynamic tricks for testing, stripping parts of it, etc.

- LPeg support [1]. PEGs are great!

- The creator of Lua was my advisor since undergrad. :) (Which means that I program in Lua for a long time...)

http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html

And this means that the performance is not the first (or second) reason to use Ceu, right? In other words, is it somewhat slow?

I wrote in Lua the source-to-source compiler that takes a ".ceu" and generates a ".c" (the code is a single-threaded state machine), which is then compiled with gcc.

The compiler is slow, but not the final binary.

We wrote a paper [1] that compares flash,RAM,CPU usage from Céu vs hand-written event-driven code in C. The differences are negligible.

[1] http://www.ceu-lang.org/chico/ceu_sensys13_pre.pdf

Why not plug into LLVM? Just generate an LLVM backend.

- Céu can embed blocks in C and call it directly

- C is more portable

- C is easier to generate