[ejflick]

Would you mind iterating on how it could be improved and how these changes relate to the context in which you've worked?

I've used it a bit for simple game development(Love2D). It's an okay language but it seems only suitable for building anything beyond small systems. No good IDE support and needing to emulate OOP was a bit annoying to me.

[legends2k]

Try ZeroBrane, a pretty good IDE for Lua with debugger.

As for object-orientation it takes Go or Rust-like approach where there isn't an explicit class construct but conventions; you can build your own or use libraries to get there. In fact Rust or Go are younger so Lua should be appreciated for doing this a lot earlier. Having rigid object-oriented-ness will generally make the language less usable with other paradigms like functional, imperative, generic, etc.

[corysama]

OO in Lua is the same as OO in classic JavaScript, just slightly more manual. In fact, in lots of ways Lua can be viewed as a cleaned up, simplified JS.

[shakna]

I often use a mix of moonscript [0] and Lua, because the Lua that moonscript generates for classes takes away a heap of the overhead when dealing with a whole heap of stateful things that you expect to run across for game dev.

[0] https://moonscript.org/