> Lua is concise yet supports almost every language feature one can find in dynamic languages
Having yet another terrible package manager? A non-existent ecosystem outside of checks notes game scripting and nginx? Reinvent-Everything where every developer everywhere has to reinvent everything poorly because the language is “concise” and “embeddable” and stuck in the 90s? Breaking changes between versions and interprets worse than the Python2/3 fiasco?
These points are well-known and many would agree if not for the tone of your comment and the missing context, which is:
I have been working on a research project to make writing VMs easier. <snip>. I chose Lua as the experiment target for my idea, mainly because <quote>
This is the most reasonable choice, because experimenting with a big one would drag all the complexity into the project but not the interesting parts. Which language would you suggest instead and why?
None of those are a factor when implementing an interpreter for Lua 5.1. One example given is stackful coroutines, which has nothing to do with package managers, release dates, or the differences between versions.
IOW, Deegen is a proof-of-concept that is being developed on Lua 5.1. Once it is more mature, it will be able to produce other bytecode VMs, too. Lua 5.1 just has enough language features to exercise a lot of capabilities, or in other words, result in Deegen being quite versatile.
Having yet another terrible package manager? A non-existent ecosystem outside of checks notes game scripting and nginx? Reinvent-Everything where every developer everywhere has to reinvent everything poorly because the language is “concise” and “embeddable” and stuck in the 90s? Breaking changes between versions and interprets worse than the Python2/3 fiasco?
Yessir I do them me those “features”.