so I finally got a luajit and some standard libs working together in my environment
the reason why it took so long is I use nixos and nix-darwin and... well, you know... it was non-obvious how to get everything working together "because Nix" but with the help of a good LLM I figured it out.
HOLY HELL IS THIS FAST.
i had the brand new chatgpt 4.1 rewrite a name=value pretty-printer terminal function from elixir (which I used because it was easy and maintainable, but at the cost of the VM startup) to lua.
272ms for the elixir version (`env | name-value-to-table`) vs. 17ms for the Lua version (`env | name-value-to-table-lua`). WOW. 1/16 the time LOL.
You'll need a glob function, cd/getcwd/setcwd, pretty-printer. That's about it.
Lua stdlib replaces sed, awk, grep, cut, tr, tail, etc.
Startup time is the best. In my testing, a lua script that functions like `echo` runs faster than echo.