[muchwhales]

One point that wasn't mentioned: It has a performance-oriented alternative implementation, called LuaJIT.

With this, you can run JIT-compiled Lua code at speeds comparable to V8 (the NodeJS runtime), and almost as good as the Java VM (depending on the workload, YMMV). LuaJIT also includes a foreign function interface (FFI) for even closer integration with native code, which makes it almost trivial to use native libraries from Lua.

Essentially, this makes it easy to move logic to lower/higher levels of the stack when/if you need it: There's the three layers that are increasingly more difficult to use but faster (Lua -> FFI -> C/C++), and you can directly use gamedev-oriented C++ or even graphics APIs like WebGPU from Lua, without crippling performance or writing tons of glue code.

Note that I've worked with Lua for many years and I'm definitely biased. I've also worked with JavaScript/TypeScript-based engines, where my favorite is BabylonJS (it's great, but JS/browsers really aren't...). So if you don't want to learn Lua/C++ I can recommend looking into BabylonJS as a starting point - it will probably be easier to get something going thanks to the browser APIs.