Comment by kragen

Well, I'm not dead yet! Looking for work, which is harder since I'm in Argentina.

Flash-freezing Lua might not have been so bad; that's basically what every project using Lua does anyway. And by 01995 it was open source.

In case anyone is interested, here's a test function from the Lua 2.1 release (February 01995):

    function savevar (n,v)
     if v == nil then return end;
     if type(v) == "number" then print(n.."="..v) return end
     if type(v) == "string" then print(n.."='"..v.."'") return end
     if type(v) == "table" then
       if v.__visited__ ~= nil then
         print(n .. "=" .. v.__visited__);
       else
        print(n.."=@()")
        v.__visited__ = n;
        local r,f;
        r,f = next(v,nil);
        while r ~= nil do
          if r ~= "__visited__" then
            if type(r) == 'string' then
              savevar(n.."['"..r.."']",f)
            else
              savevar(n.."["..r.."]",f)
            end
          end
          r,f = next(v,r)
        end
       end
     end
    end

It wouldn't have been suitable in some other ways. For example, in versions of Lua since 4.0 (released in 02000), most Lua API functions take a lua_State* as their first argument, so that you can have multiple Lua interpreters active in the same process. All earlier versions of Lua stored the interpreter state in static variables, so you could only have one Lua interpreter per process, clearly a nonstarter for the JavaScript use case.

The Lua version history https://www.lua.org/versions.html gives some indication of what a hypothetical Sketnape Inc. would have been missing out on by embedding Lua instead of JavaScript. Did JavaScript have lexical scoping with full (implicit) closures from the beginning? Because I remember being very pleasantly surprised to discover that it did when I tried it in 02000, and Lua didn't get that feature until Lua 5.0 in 02003.