> Lua is far superior

I disagree with this assessment.

LuaJIT is nearly 3x faster than V8 JavaScript the last time I checked. Just anecodal DDG search [0]. Maybe V8 has gotten faster since the last time I checked.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=is+luajit+faster+than+v8+ja...

I think a big part of the point is to build a js runtime for existing js code and libraries.

Probably it will not replace node soon, but it is a possible outcome.

Also didn't luajit had the problem that it would never move to more recent version of lua? I remember that some years ago there was some talking about this.

Lua also has a smaller footprint I think.

It has a worse standard library than Javascript. And its static typing solutions don't compare to Typescript.

Funnily enough the state of art in typed lua is typescript: https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

It depends what you mean by "superior". JavaScript (well v8) is far safer as a scripting runtime. And there are a ton of existing JS libs for solving problems. AND there's TypeScript, which is pretty great.

i suspect it is more that the whole world is familiar.