Lua is a general-purpose high-level language created since the 1990s at PUC Rio de Janeiro.

Lua provides a sweet spot along three axes:

• high-level dynamic syntax with anonymous functions and closures
• reasonably high performance by compiling to a virtual machine's bytecode
• small and approachable implementation with no dependencies beyond C

Lua also provides a framework for graphical applications called LÖVE. LÖVE depends on the host OS for graphics. On Unix-descended systems, that is approximately the SDL2 library.