Oh wow you were editing the source of LuaJIT? That sounds like a nightmare. I'm pretty sure Mike Pall is the only person who understands that codebase lol.

To be honest I am trying to move away from LuaJIT, now that q66's cffi-lua project exists I don't have a reason to use LuaJIT from a dev productivity perspective. For speed, sure. But for my use-case regular Lua is fast enough and the added features in 5.4 over 5.1 are really nice. Plus having the option to easily edit the Lua source code if I want gives me a lot of comfort, since the codebase is way simpler than LuaJIT's.

I have removed LuaJIT from everything I use other than OpenResty. If I could, I would remove it from OpenResty but that is a huge undertaking

Yeah the garbage collector is one of the things in Lua I really don't like - in Lua 5.4 Roberto added the <close> thing and generational GC but I'm not sure how well these work in practice. I guess I'm lucky enough in that I have never hit the upper limit where a GC cycle totally kills performance and if that ever happens I have the option of rewriting that code in C