When Prosody began, in 2008, Lua was not an obvious choice for developing a real-time network service. Compared to alternative languages, Lua had a poor ecosystem (and some say, still has). Node.js was not yet born, and the world was not used to the idea of serious high-performance services being written in high-level "scripting" languages.

Many things have changed since that time, both in the Lua world and beyond. "Why Lua?" is no longer our top FAQ, and the Lua ecosystem has improved considerably.

We faced challenges along the way, and learned a lot. This talk examines some events in our project's history as they relate to the Lua language.