Being light in every sense of the word is a primary feature of the language.

Lua is great for high-level control of a program written in C/C++. When setting that up, I’ve often appreciated that I could removed features like file I/O from the Lua standard library and the rest keeps on trucking.

Lua is terrible for writing programs by itself. People keep trying to make it happen. But, for anything non-trivial, it’s a fool’s errand.