Comment by hollerith

I think it is more like this: the Lua code emits assembly code or LLVM intermediate representation or C source code, then arranges for the assembly code to be assembled (then possibly arranges for the code to be executed, then terminates).

Many years ago, someone wrote a Haskell library along the same lines that lets the library's user mimic assembly language with Haskell code. One thing I particularly liked about this library is that (by deviating a little from the standard way of indenting Haskell code) the user could mimic the 2 columns of assembly language. E.g., in

  foo <-  statement
          statement2
  bar <-  statement3

"foo" and "bar" would be a labels, and that mimics the look of assembly language in that the leftmost 15 or so characters (columns) in an assembly-language file are usually reserved for labels. (I.e., if a line has no label, those 15 characters are blank.)