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I've been in game dev for decades, and I've never understood the desire for lua.

That's not totally true, it's easy to integrate and fast. But the language semantics and tooling leave a lot to be desired.

I'm hopeful we get an embedded version of another language. Something as easy to embed as lua, but without the lua. I'd much rather write JavaScript or Rust or anything else.

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WebAssembly is pretty good at filling the same niche, but it takes a lot more work to interface between the guest and host than Lua.

I agree with you, I don't like Lua either. I especially don't understand why it's so good for embedding, and how people haven't implemented a subset of the project's original language as a scripting language, so that they don't have to write two very different syntaxes (and programming paradigms).

Implementing a subset of C or C++ as a scripting language is actually a lot of work, and is not fun to actually script in.

I have a hard time imagining that. PHP for example is fun to script in, and resembles a C/C++ more than Lua does. Of course fun is subjective, and I have no idea about the issues of embedding (why Lua works for that, and why other languages haven't got more traction).

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