[stcredzero]

This means many of the language decisions were chosen so they were easy to make fast.

This is a big part of how Smalltalk was designed as well. The motivation back then was just to have a powerful OO system that would run fast enough...ish. I've seen emulations of those early Smalltalk systems. The slow reputation came from there.

I suspect the same sort of thinking went into the design of Lua.