>>11
A good language for writing small bits of scripting code does not make a good language for standalone development of a full application.
Lua's merits are primarily that it has a lightweight, flexible API, and supplies very little in the expectation that the bulk of the code will be supplied by some other application into which it is being embedded. To try to use it by itself for anything beyond the most simplistic and trivial toy application is surely a mistake; you will only end up writing large chunks of code in C, which is certainly the last thing you want to be doing for a web application.