Comment by eslaught
5 years ago
In case anyone is still reading this, I'm here now. Still happy to answer any questions.
I'll also add that we're always looking for new contributors. We're an 100% community run project, so everything is driven by people who care about things stepping in to do them. If you're interested in compiler technology, there's a wide variety of things to work on.
I'm curious if it a new syntax was ever considered. It seems as though if you dropped Lua compatibility you might be able to make it a bit cleaner, although it's a big undertaking.
We've actually gotten some mileage out of being able to swap one Lua implementation for another. (To date, I think we've tried LuaJIT, Moonjit, and PUC Lua.) E.g., we still rely on Moonjit for PPC64le support, even though it's technically unmaintained.
I've definitely got a long list of gripes with Lua... but they're not really enough to take on the additional maintenance burden.