You can argue you don't need those things, but their lack isn't a feature either. If you're not coupling to C's memory model or if for some reason someone has already done the work of building and debugging the integration... you gain nothing by using lua over js.
I've done professional work in lua and it's highly overrated imo. For integrated languages Tcl or janet is a better choice, unless your use case is extremely extremely simple and then forth is a better choice. The only time I would choose lua is if I'm integrating with C, the integration language tasks are very simple but also requires coroutines. Lua's coroutines are genuinely good.
Lua is technically superior, but JavaScript is practically superior due to its ubiquitous platform the web browser.
Similar but different to C "beating" Lisp.
JavaScript as it is today is a vastly more ergonomic and fluid experience, and I am saying this as someone that has written tons of both.
The embedding experience with Lua is likely much more form fit than JavaScript (sandboxing, etc). I’m strictly speaking about syntax and language features.
0-index arrays express offsets, 1-index arrays express index selection. In C (and family) arrays start at zero because they offset, `a[i]` literally means `* (a+i)` (you actually can write `i[a]`, it will work and be valid). For other language selecting 1 base indexing is not a weird option, I'd argue.
With Deno I know I can quickly spawn lots of isolated instances at very low overhead.
If I really want to push it far, there's tools for loading frozen snapshots that have lots of code loaded.
I've never seen similar from Lua & I'm not sure it exists. Seems like a huge advantage.
Err..new to Deno - how does one do this ?
There are a lot of browser API's. They're portable, designed with security in mind (at least somewhat), usually well documented, reasonably easy to understand, and people already know them. So, even if it's not a browser, you may prefer JavaScript so you don't reinvent the relevant API's and there's less to learn.
Deno itself is a good example of this.
Because I like TypeScript and don't like Lua.
JavaScript, I don't like. It's in the same bucket to me as Python, Ruby, and Lua - things I might have to use sometimes but I'm holding my nose. But TypeScript? I like TypeScript and want to use it more.