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I guess it provides less freedom/flexibility on the dev side. You're forced to use LuaJIT, and you're forced to buy into OpenResty's coroutine paradigm where global variables act weird, and stuff like that. Also I bet it doesn't play super nice with LuaRocks.

Totally valid choice to make, but in my opinion OP is missing out. OpenResty is state of the art and has a ton of great libraries embedded in it. It's "batteries included" so to speak, and the batteries are well designed. Yichun Zhang is one of the GOATs, along with Mike Pall. And Roberto, obviously.

While everything you said there is true, it is a matter of taste for me. I prefer working with PUC Lua over LuaJIT. The speed improvement of LuaJIT doesn't matter for me, the only thing I miss from it is the FFI. I wish PUC Lua had the same FFI interface tbh.

It does. https://github.com/q66/cffi-lua

One of these days I'll port OpenResty to use PUC Lua and this FFI.

Why not go with redbean?

Can the redbean webserver dynamically parse markdown?

on the very early releases, I couldn't get it work well. I know it works well now and may take it for a spin again.

I am more familiar with Caddy and The way OpenResty uses Lua was never very clear to me in my cursory 40 minutes attempt to use it.