[wahern]

Except liblemon is larger than liblua.

  $ ls -lh /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblua5.3.so.0.0.0
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 219K Apr 13  2016 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblua5.3.so.0.0.0

And that's with Lua having many more bindings--basically, all of ANSI C, including math and stdio interfaces. Lemon only seems to bind a dozen or so POSIX routines--see os.c and socket.c.

There are other things that make it less suited for embedding than Lua. For example, Lua very carefully avoids touching any global process state. But one the very first things lemon_create() does it call srandom().

Those particular things, at least, could be easily remedied. Another reason why Lua is great for embedding is because of it's very carefully designed C API. With just a cursory look I can't tell how well Lemon compares on that score.