[LewisJEllis]

Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list is to provide an overview of what's out there.

As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be reconsidered.

[walterbell]

> Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community

Is that for technical reasons or because Lua is commonly used in proprietary apps?

[castell]

The Lua language and LuaJIT are great.

The user base is fragmented (version 4, 5.1 (LuaJIT) vs 5.2), as Lua is usually used as embedded language (alongside C, C++, ...) for video games (World of Warcraft, Far Cry, ...), applications (Adobe Lightroom, ...), etc.

And the http://lua.org website is a bit too minimalistic to offer community features. The project only hosts a mailing list and a old-school wiki. The additional libraries are/were hosted on http://luaforge.net , an outdated sourceforge clone. The documentation is static and the development process itself is not so open. The Lua language standard library is lacking functions almost every other language ship with their default package (so everyone has to either find & download additional libraries or reinvent the wheel).

Other languages like PHP have a documentation that allows the community to add comments and code samples.

[walterbell]

If someone created a community site with editable docs, do you think it would gain traction?

[LewisJEllis]

Not necessarily proprietary apps, but a wide variety of use cases; Lua is embedded in all kinds of different stuff and used for game dev, webdev, embedded scripting, WoW, configuration, and much more, whereas JS, for example, is used in just two main (related) cases. This makes Lua's userbase rather fragmented across these niches.