Re:A History of Lua (2001)
by spacechild1 on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @04:09AM
(#32409089)
Lua has been designed as an embeddable scripting language and it is used as such in various domains and programs. It's not really suited for developing large applications, though.
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You can write largish standalone application in Lua and it is not always a poor choice - Prosody [1] first comes to mind. But qualities which make it a good embedded language make it less _attractive_ for other uses.
Lua has very simple syntax and small stdlib which allows its implementation to be very small - you can add Lua to your application and not increase its size significantly. But when the size is not a concern most programmers prefer languages with rich, powerful syntax lots of features and batteries-included stdlib (which is completely opposite of Lua).