The official Lua documentation is very helpful and thorough. There are also a large number of online resources or books with lots of helpful information for beginners and advanced users alike.
One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game.
Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages.
Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler.
Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation).
When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K.
The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers.
Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can:
Implement critical parts in C
Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page:
LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C.
The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming.
The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics:
Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)).
Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()).
Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages.
Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages.
When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs.
Gluon is a garbage-collected language but uses a separate heap for each executing gluon thread. This keeps each heap small, reducing the overhead of the garbage collector
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