I liked this post, and I can totally understand where you’re coming from…
But couldn’t anything you say about Lua also be said about JS? You mentioned how Lua wasn’t batteries included, so you try to limit your libraries. Couldn’t you say the same for JS? JS itself doesn’t change much, it’s the ecosystem. Couldn’t you just pick out some small and stable libraries the same way you could with Lua?
For me, it isn't 100% language warts. It is the customer experience that matters the most for me. Can I compile and ship my products to my customers without having them to install a VMs, container runtime or a language runtime? That the question that is critical for me.
I agree, I think that you must really like golang and how easy it can make cross compilation and how fast it is to build.
Golang has one of the best developer experiences and there are only very very few minor nitpicks I might have of the language but the whole ecosystem on packaging software and what not is just so easy and I love golang.
I love JS, don't get me wrong, I absolutelly love Javascript. But I love the JS that the browser runs and understands. I hate the current ecosystem of bundlers, transpilers, typescript, npm modules and so on.
Yes, I could have picked a js runtime and done the same thing. The same thing could also have been done with literally any other language.
It is less of a "Only Lua Can Do This" situation and more of a "I Like Working with Lua" situation.