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That's it - I'm building my next startup in Lua!

A useful design pattern is to write highly efficient "engine" code in C/C++ and then tie it together to highly customizable application code with an embedded scripting language.

Lua is great for this, and while you could use a LISP (Emacs, AutoCad) or a FORTH (any real-life example not from the radio telescope domain?) or Tcl/Tk (https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl), Lua is small (as in number of concepts to understand), easy to read and understand, and compact (as in tiny codebase to integrate, few dependencies).

So many gaming startups have put their money on Lua.

The Lua-C API is also really consistent and straightforward. Bindings can be generated mechanically, of course, but it's really easy to embed by hand, and the documentation is superb.

And LLM's should be proficient in Lua and the bindings by now. That will help with velocity.

I believe cloudflare has quite a bit of Lua in some of their products (there's some very good Nginx lua integrations and variants like Openresty).

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