[samatman]

Your last paragraph is the essence of why I chose Lua for my own projects, especially the FFI, but unfortunately doesn't apply to all of Lua. The divergence between Lua and LuaJIT is certainly not a strength.

The 'stock' Lua interpreter is very fast, very small (good for cache retention) and all its C functions are reentrant, so no global interpreter lock: those apply to both flavors.

As the tiniest of nitpicks, `_G` is the default home of the global environment, but it's just a variable. The correct way to get the environment is `getfenv(1)` or just `_ENV`, depending on your flavor.