[catwell]

I disagree strongly with that.

Penlight is the closest thing there is to a Lua standard library (loosely modeled after what exists in Python). It is maintained by Steve Donovan who is one of the most active members of the community and the author of http://www.luafaq.org/, LDoc and lake.

Having contributed to Penlight myself I can say it is certainly not poorly maintained compared to most other Lua projects.

I agree, Penlight is not the best at everything it does, and it probably does too much (which is why there is microlight), but it is still a tool most Lua users need to know about.