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Re:Fennel – Lisp in Lua by formerly_proven on Sunday September 06, 2020 @12:22PM (#24392416)
Lua is a tiny, relatively simple language with a simple data model built on a small runtime that's very fast for an interpreter and easy to embed into C/C++ applications (once you dealt with the stack, mentally or otherwise). Startup time is ~nil.

Python is a large, complex language with an exceedingly complicated data model built on a runtime where the core interpreter is about ~4 MB, which is also a pretty slow interpreter (mostly due to the exceedingly complicated data model). Python is certainly not hard to embed on an API level, but somewhat annoying to package up for a build. Python is very hard to sandbox, whereas Lua is basically sandboxed by default. Startup time is on the order of ~100-200 ms.

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