- Acceptable license? MIT
- you need something that builds everywhere. It probably does? At least it compiles with Turbo C 1.0.
- Modicum of security: probably.
Lua is also small compared to Perl, is easily embeddable, and seems to have a sane syntax compared to Perl.
I do understand why they use Perl though, probably more OpenBSD developers/users are familiar with it.
Edit: Sort of makes me wonder why a VERY C-like, small, dynamically typed, scripting language never emerged. Squirrel is kind of close, but not quite what I mean.
Csh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell) was the de facto standard shell on many Unix systems and still is widely used.
However, it has some issues:
There's been some WIP to also use it for some pkgbase stuff, as well as an ldconfig lua script for use in post-install scripts now that pkg supports post-install.lua.
I've had my eye on a couple of other components that could use a rewrite with flua. A new flua-based replacement for kernel config(8) could be quite excellent, for instance.