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It is true that LuaJIT is stuck at 5.1, but you could write any performance critical sections in C/C++ and call it from Lua.

Lack of LuaJIT for 5.1+ isn't that big of a deal for desktop apps. The embedded world is still stuck in 5.1, but for them, the benefits of the latest Lua is marginal.

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And despite it being stuck at 5.1, it still implements features from other versions. For example, there is the "LJ_52" macro, so you can compile "table.pack" and "table.unpack" into LuaJIT, which I do, because I use both at times.

As someone else have pointed it out, they are cherry picked: https://luajit.org/extensions.html.

There is also the compat53 library which polyfills most of the missing parts. The Teal compiler has --gen-target and --gen-compat flags which adapts the generated Lua code for different Lua versions, and allows using the compat53 library behind the scenes if desired, so you can get a mostly Lua-5.3+ experience over LuaJIT using Teal.

and if you use luajit ffi, those calls actually get called just as fast as from a c program

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