It's not just a tiny C compiler - it's a compiler you can use as a static library that can compile your C code directly to memory. And then you can call into it, if you dare.
I used it as a scripting backend for a long time, but eventually you will realize that you are not the only one that could write scripts, but you also really need to have a trust boundary (or just a different address space), so that errors in the script don't drag the whole thing down.
That's where Lua and LuaJIT shines: It's simple, and it's sandboxed. However, there is still one thing missing. These days, several programming languages have several targets that they can compile to, and so imagine if you could emulate some platform at high performance with low overhead, in a sandbox. You would then be able to script in whatever language you so desire, provided it has that target.
Unfortunately, those languages tend to be system languages and not the absolute best for scripting. With one big exception: Compile-time programming support.
I used it as a scripting backend for a long time, but eventually you will realize that you are not the only one that could write scripts, but you also really need to have a trust boundary (or just a different address space), so that errors in the script don't drag the whole thing down.
That's where Lua and LuaJIT shines: It's simple, and it's sandboxed. However, there is still one thing missing. These days, several programming languages have several targets that they can compile to, and so imagine if you could emulate some platform at high performance with low overhead, in a sandbox. You would then be able to script in whatever language you so desire, provided it has that target.
Unfortunately, those languages tend to be system languages and not the absolute best for scripting. With one big exception: Compile-time programming support.