[cageface]

Yeah Lua bucks the trend. Maybe it's just a matter of the experience and skill of the team and not the number of man-hours dumped into it?

Maybe it's a little bit like writing graphics drivers, just one of those things that only a small handful of people can really do well.

[Twisol]

I remember reading something about how JavaScript has so many backwards-compatibility edge cases that it's extremely difficult to write a performant engine. Unfortunately I can't find my source.

Lua has the turtle's mindset. It's gone slow and steady, and its releases are anything but frequent. However, that just goes to show how stable of a product it is.

(Considering the context, maybe a turtle wasn't the best comparison...)