Improving Lua 5.1 VM Performance in Go: Addressing Memory and Speed Issues in Real-World Applications

Introduction Lua 5.1 has long been a staple for embedded scripting in Go applications, but its existing VMs—gopher-lua and go-lua—struggle with critical performance and memory inefficiencies. These issues are not theoretical; they manifest in real-world applications like MUD clients, where loading large datasets (e.g., a 9 MB CBOR file causing ~500 MB heap usage) or executing complex operations (e.g., pathfinding scripts taking 3 seconds vs. 0.1 seconds in non-Go clients) expose the