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Would you mind iterating on how it could be improved and how these changes relate to the context in which you've worked?

I've used it a bit for simple game development(Love2D). It's an okay language but it seems only suitable for building anything beyond small systems. No good IDE support and needing to emulate OOP was a bit annoying to me.

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Try ZeroBrane, a pretty good IDE for Lua with debugger.

As for object-orientation it takes Go or Rust-like approach where there isn't an explicit class construct but conventions; you can build your own or use libraries to get there. In fact Rust or Go are younger so Lua should be appreciated for doing this a lot earlier. Having rigid object-oriented-ness will generally make the language less usable with other paradigms like functional, imperative, generic, etc.

OO in Lua is the same as OO in classic JavaScript, just slightly more manual. In fact, in lots of ways Lua can be viewed as a cleaned up, simplified JS.

I often use a mix of moonscript [0] and Lua, because the Lua that moonscript generates for classes takes away a heap of the overhead when dealing with a whole heap of stateful things that you expect to run across for game dev.

[0] https://moonscript.org/

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