LUA is FFOC

LUA is the toy language for those who enjoy the Forced Flushing Of L1/L2 Cache per operation. In fact, every operation causes several L2 cache misses during table look-ups, flushing both the L1 and L2 caches.

http://www.slideshare.net/hughreynolds/optimizing-lua-for-consoles-allen-murphy-microsoft

Enjoy your FFOC.

I'm guessing poor Lua performance comes from guys who don't understand how lexical closures work and so make hash tables for every persistent bit of data.

Poor perforamnce is caused by cretins who write inelegant bullshit, not languages.