Lua is a funky little language and runtime but it is absolutely perfect for scripting in the domain that it was designed for: embedded.
I used to do a lot of game dev and it was incredible for testing different interactions/movements etc at runtime just to get all the inputs right and then implement in the game code. It has saved me probably 1,000s of man-hours in my career. Nowadays I use it in NGINX for high-velocity requests that are just backed by Redis. Lua, LuaJIT, and Redis have made me a lot of money in my career. I'm forever indebted to their incredible creators and community.
> Nowadays I use it in NGINX for high-velocity requests that are just backed by Redis.
Can you talk more about this? Sounds like some dark magic
We use NGINX + Lua [1] to collect real-time diagnostic and performance data from physical machines while they operate. We collect about 150,000 data points (HTTP requests) per second with 2 NGINX servers and 2 Redis servers. We've benchmarked this particular server group up to almost a million req/s before it started to break down (median resp time > 100ms).