I'll leave the pros/cons of the language itself to others, but two of Lua's most attractive aspects are its size and speed. The interpreter is something like 200k and is built to be embedded into anything. For instance, RPM has a Lua interpreter embedded into it and here's Dino's paper about using it in 'sploits: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot07/tech/full_papers/... Benchmarks are notoriously unreliable but I encourage you to Google around for Lua v X language. It's _very_ peppy.