I haven’t found many downsides yet. I was already starting to rewrite some things in Awk (which I was drawn to for similar reasons- fast script startup time, simple easy language with good defaults), but Awk (while still also awesome) isn’t really designed for stuff beyond a certain size (no signal handling unless you use a fork, for example)

LuaJIT is missing bignums, ints that aren’t floats, bit operations, and native utf8 handling, but it can pretty easily be extended with libraries, ffi and metatabling. (I actually made a working bignum library that integrates with gmp, but it has a memory leak somewhere and it’s a rabbit hole/bikeshedding project at this point…)

LLM assistance helps hugely and I really like YueScript’s syntax additions. You can point any LLM at a syntax describing webpage and it will pretty much write that language for you…

I do think you're better off using ruby, but if you insist.

Lots of default functionality missing so you MUST have these packages: inspect, luaposix, lrexlib-pcre, lrexlib-posix, lpeg, luastd/stdlib, luasocket, luahttp, luasec, luacheck, penlight

* luajit is unnecessary in almost all cases, you don't need the speed.

* use lsp or luacheck whenever you write something, entr -c luacheck file on everything.

* patterns are not regex which means they do not support lookups, backtracking or |, so you must install lrexlib-pcre or lrexlib-posix (frankly I never need pcre so I stick to lrexlib-gnu or lrexlib-posix).

* overload _ENV so it auto requires unknown things, I have a lua wrapper that does this and it makes it a joy not having all of my scripts with a bunch of require"posix" on all of them

* install inspect to inspect tables

* os.execute and io.popen only accepts strings as parameters which means you should overload it and make a function that accepts tables as well.

* 5.4 is still lacking support for many libraries, 5.3 has most of the libraries.

* assignments default to the global environment so you have to use local keyword or set _ENV to error on assignment (or better yet, don't care, just local _ENV = mymodule)

Overall, Lua is just a mixture of C with a pascal syntax and garbage collection (and also tables which is a weird data structure)