You seem like you might know the answer to this question that I've had about Lua:

I can find games, window managers, embedded devices, and a bunch of other stuff that can be scripted with Lua, but there doesn't seem to be anything like a Visual Basic equivalent that lets you layout a GUI graphically and tie the controls and events together with Lua, at least not for native applications. Why is that? It seems like it'd be a good fit.

I have some familiarity with GUI builders. In general, those tend to be targeted at end-user consumer software like desktop applications, web services, and mobile apps. For game development and embedded systems, there is a strong preference for custom, bespoke stuff. It's especially bad in embedded systems which never had an open source "standard library" till Arduino. The ecosystem is highly fragmented compared to e.g. your average smartphone and PC. An industrial control panel UI using Material Design on a high end ARM core won't necessarily run on a health tracker powered by a STM32 or Atmel chip. For gaming, the story is a bit different. Lua is heavily used there but because every game is different, the GUI parts tend to be done with custom designs. The type of UI builders used in Game Development is rather different than the sort used in desktop software but there are plenty. If you are looking for a minimal resource consumption language with good cross-platform rapid UI development as a first-class priority, I recommend you check out the Red programming language.

For Lua, it's use as a mainstream application development language is still in it's early stages. The language follows the mantra of move fast and break things so backwards compatibility isn't a top priority and this can be an issue in evergreen codebases like web apps (unless you are willing to lock to a specific version). Most web servers (most famously OpenResty, a Lua NGINX hybrid) are still on 5.1 due to LuaJIT.

Given Lua's age and use in so many projects, I was under the impression that it was somewhat stable.

Basically, my interest in Lua is this: I'd like to build a personal computing environment that is oriented towards end-user empowerment the way I remember them being in the pre-web era. To that end, employing a relatively simple interpreted language to build as much of the environment as possible is desired such that the end user is able to read and modify large portions of it, as well as create their own tools. Something on the level of Visual Basic or HyperCard would be useful for the GUI portions, and Lua is popular enough to have a lot of learning resources available, so it was an option I was considering.

It is fairly stable in terms of syntax. Just that features like Unicode support etc. tend to be difficult to implement without deep changes. For OS dev, look into Node9 and https://www.lua.org/wshop13/Cormack.pdf

There have been quite a few attempts at building OSes with Lua as main system/userland language. There are very few Lua implementations that can bootstrap so you still need a bit of non-Lua code as glue for the interpreter bits if not for juggling pointers.

Thank you, I've joined your newsletter. This is exactly what Lua is currently lacking. When I have more time, I'll probably do some writeups on Lua, especially CI/CD and developing libraries.

If you are willing, drop me an email with anything you want me to publish as e.g. a contributing editorial etc.

You can reach me at Luadigest at <my username> .com