The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so little code.
Unfortunately, Lua doesn’t have the same level of marketing and hype as some other languages. This lack of promotion means that fewer developers are aware of Lua’s capabilities and benefits. It is often perceived as a niche language, primarily used in gaming and embedded systems.
Lua is a free, reflexive and imperative scripting language. Created in 1993, designed to be embedded within other applications to extend them. The interpreter was developed by Brazillian engineers and has been updated many times since.
The C API is easy to use and gives good performance, and yet encapsulates enough of the VM's implementation that C modules are source and binary compatible with both Lua and LuaJIT. Its syntax is clean and minimalistic, making it accessible even for beginners, yet is incredibly easy to master.
Lua is designed to be easily embedded into applications written in other languages, particularly C and C++. This makes it an excellent choice for scripting and extending games and embedded applications. In C for example, embedding Lua is as :