There is a need for a lightweight tools for experiments with RISC-V custom extensions. Adding support for custom instructions in binutils/gcc/llvm is out of range for many hardware architects. LuaJIT includes a small and powerful assembler: dynasm, accessible from within Lua interpreter. Currently dynasm supports following 32 and 64-bit instruction sets: x86, x64, ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS, and it is just reasonable to extend this support to RISC-V.

Lua itself is a very compact and simple yet powerful dynamic language, its JIT compiler (luajit) makes it one of the fastest, if not the fastest, interpreted language, and it is used in many projects, so having it running on RISC-V would have use besides the mere internal need for experimental platform.