[eslaught]

I would just note, for anyone else coming on this, that in Terra you can also call back into Lua. From an implementation perspective, sure it goes through the C API, but as far as users are concerned, it looks pretty much like a normal function call (except as of the 2016 release you have to cast the Lua function to a specific type, but I don't think this is a terribly big deal).

The bigger issue is that as soon as you call from Terra back to Lua you've made a circular dependency, and so you can't then dump an object file and have it be entirely free of the Lua VM. This for me happens to be one of the big selling points of Terra, because I know that I can write as much code as I want and (usually) can still come out with clean object files to link into any old project on the other side.

I definitely get the appeal of a system which is intended to integrate with the same VM. If it weren't for some of the constraints of my current project, I'd definitely be thinking about it, so I'm glad that people are putting effort into exploring both approaches.