I'm not super experienced with Lua - what's missing for a generic deep copy? Is there no real reflection system?
Lua has a type of value called "userdata" that is just an opaque reference to a C resource. There's no way for Lua to know how do a deep copy of that resource, if it's possible at all. Tables can also have "metatables" that modify how they function. It's not obvious whether a deep copy should also create a deep copy of the metatable (and its metatable, and so on) or whether the copy should share the original metatable. There's good arguments either way.
I think the argument is more that Roblox should be setting up its Lua environment that way.
> In python, you can just go "dict2 = dict(dict1)", or "dict2 = dict1.copy()", both of those are easy enough, and more importantly, they're intuitive: want a copy? Call the copy function!
A shallow copy, which can be very surprising. And since Lua has metatables and userdata, it's impossible to write a deep copy that works correctly in all circumstances.