Larry Wall (of Perl fame) famously cited Laziness as one of the three great virtues of the software developer (the other 2 being Impatience and Hubris). C is still the lingua franca of systems programming, but if you want to do C programming right one thing you can't afford is to be lazy. You have to do manual memory management, behavior is written in stone at compile time and the joke goes that every non-trivial project has it's own linked list implementation. There exists however a not so well-hidden superpower that allows you to program in C, get the performance where it counts, and still have plenty of time for chatter around the coffee machine.

That superpower is the Lua programming language.

This lightning talk will approach Lua from a C programmer's perspective: how Lua can help alleviate some pain points of C, illustrate some common patterns for how to integrate Lua with C (and vice versa) and how you can get up and running with Lua in your C project.