Luau seems to be significantly more complex than Lua - I'm not sure it can still be called "small". Looking at the relative size of the implementations: Luau's is 120,000 lines of C++ [0], an order of magnitude larger than Lua 5.1's 14,000 lines of C.
But I think that complexity is unavoidable for a gradually- or statically-typed language. Any language with a reasonably-complete type system is inevitably going to be much more complex than a dynamically-typed scripting language.
[0] Counting *.cpp files in the "Analysis", "AST", "Compiler" and "VM" directories
But I think that complexity is unavoidable for a gradually- or statically-typed language. Any language with a reasonably-complete type system is inevitably going to be much more complex than a dynamically-typed scripting language.
[0] Counting *.cpp files in the "Analysis", "AST", "Compiler" and "VM" directories