What problem does it solve?
make DEBUG=0 STATIC=0 USE_MALLOC=0 MODULE_OS=1 MODULE_SOCKET=1
ls -lh liblemon.so
-rwxrwxr-x 1 guest guest 271K Oct 25 08:21 liblemon.so
$ ls -lh /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblua5.3.so.0.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 219K Apr 13 2016 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblua5.3.so.0.0.0
There are other things that make it less suited for embedding than Lua. For example, Lua very carefully avoids touching any global process state. But one the very first things lemon_create() does it call srandom().
Those particular things, at least, could be easily remedied. Another reason why Lua is great for embedding is because of it's very carefully designed C API. With just a cursory look I can't tell how well Lemon compares on that score.
2, What problems are you trying to solve?
A: 1, easily integrate with C. 2, stable and modern syntax. that's all I wanted.
If it is yet again tied to a complex, feature rich VM (a stack based one), then he went the wrong way in achieving his goal. Direct interpretation should've been the way forward for such task.