Lua is fast as scripting languages go, but saying it's in the same performance ballpark as native code is a stretch [1]. Game developers that use Lua commonly rely on C/C++ for low level routines.

There's a space for innovation there. ooc [2] has been a step in that direction, although its usage of garbage collection makes it much less flexible than CoffeeScript or MoonScript. I don't think developers need to be abstracted from memory management at low level. What they could use is getting rid of a lot of cruft, to be able to write/read/think more quickly.

[1] http://attractivechaos.github.com/plb [2] http://ooc-lang.org/