[wruza]

These points are well-known and many would agree if not for the tone of your comment and the missing context, which is:

I have been working on a research project to make writing VMs easier. <snip>. I chose Lua as the experiment target for my idea, mainly because <quote>

This is the most reasonable choice, because experimenting with a big one would drag all the complexity into the project but not the interesting parts. Which language would you suggest instead and why?