Sandboxed lua can't assume it has access things like debug libraries or any of the file IO, among other things. Many setups pretty aggressively remove and/or patch libraries and even large parts of the default global table. Assuming a vanilla lua library environment can make a project like this unusable in many places.

I might be remembering wrong on where the problem was exactly, but it was either the generated code, or the code for the Fennel transpiler itself.

I just know that I tried to use it without loading Lua's libraries (i.e. without calling the `luaL_openlibs` function or equivalent) and was unable to.

> I just copy the compiled lua into the place the program expects to find lua scripts.

Yeah most existing programs just load all Lua libraries by default, so that's generally not an issue.

My post is more from the point of view of embedding a restricted Lua interpreter into a program (i.e. only Lua-the-language, not Lua-the-language-plus-its-libraries) while still supporting Fennel.

---

EDIT: Just checked, the Fennel code `(lambda [foo bar] bar)` compiles to Lua code that calls `_G.assert`.