Lua has been used a lot for that kind of embedding in the past. I think because it's easy to move data between Lua and C? Python would certainly be a big step up but I don't know how hard that kind of integration is.
It's also a tiny codebase which is easy to vendor and ship.
Python is also a decent glue language but creating a Python interpreter is a bunch more work and the API is a bit harder to work with.
The language is _tiny_ (and kept that way on purpose)
Aside from stuff like metatables(which may require you to play around for a bit to understand their value), you can pick it up in a couple of hours. I'm not even kidding. So much so that you see people modifying code without even looking at documentation.
and yes; i know that's a ridiculous example that's not really comparable for anything significant.
Impossible. Most developers outside the games industry don't even know it exists.
... and if they knew about it, they would use it much more.
The first problem is "Which Lua?" Lua, by itself, is almost completely useless. You first need to compile/install a bunch of things in order to make Lua useful. This has the Perl problem that everybody uses a different dialect of Lua.
The second part is that the Lua constructs for programming in the large are very weak. I believe that Adobe had a postmortem about this (Lightroom, I think?)
And then there is the language, itself. For me, the 1-based indexing is death in this day and age. Sorry. Zero-based is the dominant ecosystem and not fitting into that is simply not acceptable.
How is this any different from pretty much any language out there? From a quick eyeball of RustPython's Cargo.toml[1], there are about 70 different dependencies which all need to be compiled. I haven't worked too much with Autoconf, but I am pretty sure CPython has quite a few dependencies.
[1]: https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython/blob/main/Cargo.tom...
> The second part is that the Lua constructs for programming in the large are very weak.
This is deliberate because it forces you to use the tools you are given instead of reimplementing features that can already be implemented by using other primitives in Lua.
> I believe that Adobe had a postmortem about this (Lightroom, I think?)
I can't find this article. Has anyone else had any luck?