Lua, especially with LuaJIT, is nearly as fast as C. I certainly don't want to have to run a slow language like Ruby or especially a full blown JS runtime like V8 just to run Vim, the entire point is speed and keyboard ergonomics, otherwise just use VSCode.
V8 is faster than LuaJIT. But sure, it has a large binary size.
Quite a fair point! For intensive plugins and such, this would matter quite a bit.
Babashka! Super fast clojure/lisp.
there's always fennel for a lispy layer over lua
Isn't LuaJIT kind of a dead end?
Also Ruby has been getting quite fast since YJIT (and now ZJIT):
https://railsatscale.com/2023-08-29-ruby-outperforms-c/