The things that make a language good for embedding are the opposite of what you want in a general purpose scripting language
I'm not sure I agree. What you want for embedding is something small, fast, and easily interoperable. What you want for general-purpose programming is powerful, composable abstractions. Lua meets both sets of criteria. It does so by means of exceptionally good design. The fact that it doesn't have the same object model as some other languages doesn't really prove anything, does it? Every well-designed programming language deserves to be thought of on its own terms.
Not having a featureful standard library, on the other hand, certainly is the kind of tradeoff you're talking about. But (a) is it so important to have a standard library as opposed to just pulling in the libraries one needs? and (b) you may be overestimating the difficulty of interfacing with external code in Lua. It's much easier than with other dynamic languages. "Too damn hard" seems an overstatement.
The big question with Lua is whether it's better enough than its peers to overtake them in any area other than embedding. If it is, we should see some sort of killer application of Lua. There is momentum toward an embedded-web-app style a la OpenResty, but also still a high barrier to entry; for one thing, it isn't well documented.
I'm not sure I agree. What you want for embedding is something small, fast, and easily interoperable. What you want for general-purpose programming is powerful, composable abstractions. Lua meets both sets of criteria. It does so by means of exceptionally good design. The fact that it doesn't have the same object model as some other languages doesn't really prove anything, does it? Every well-designed programming language deserves to be thought of on its own terms.
Not having a featureful standard library, on the other hand, certainly is the kind of tradeoff you're talking about. But (a) is it so important to have a standard library as opposed to just pulling in the libraries one needs? and (b) you may be overestimating the difficulty of interfacing with external code in Lua. It's much easier than with other dynamic languages. "Too damn hard" seems an overstatement.
The big question with Lua is whether it's better enough than its peers to overtake them in any area other than embedding. If it is, we should see some sort of killer application of Lua. There is momentum toward an embedded-web-app style a la OpenResty, but also still a high barrier to entry; for one thing, it isn't well documented.