This is the first time I've read this sentiment, Lua is purported to have one of the leanest, fastest interpreters around (not talking about luajit of course). Can you talk about your experience?
The Grit Engine [1] and Love2D [2] are fun, useful engines that make making games easier, in Lua. Except they're slow as all get out; the only cap on the framerate is literally Lua. If you don't use spritesheeting to its maximum degree, you can't even squeeze out 60fps for a moderate size game.
Lua is quite fast. The algorithms you can implement in Lua are all slow unless you want to make an optimized structure for every kind of lookup you want to do. Lua reminds me of a hobbled javascript.
