1-based indexing is great. It's just _different_ - from C, where the array index is just sugar for pointer arithmetic, and from other languages which borrowed the practice without reasoning.

Lua is extremely popular for game dev though?

Love2D uses openAL for audio, FreeType 2 for fonts, DevIL for image loading and Box2D for physics. It can also use image fonts. It uses luasocket for networking and has a compression API built in.

On top of that there are love2d specific libraries people have written to deal with 2D games like GUIs and tile libraries.

Then there is the ease of debugging, where you can use lua to have runtime access to the table of variables and can print them on screen if you need to, not to mention dynamically loading new update and draw and input functions.

This is all to say that just downloading SDL is not going to get anywhere close to what love2d has included.

I stand corrected!

It is easy to get Lua (with LuaJIT) working with SDL3, though.

That obviously isn't a replacement for the framework but it is perfectly doable if someone just wants to write a game in Lua with minimal overhead.

Edit: I mention LuaJIT specifically because it lets you create metaclasses around C objects, which is much easier than messing with the Lua stack from C, and it's easy to make a 2d vector class from an SDL Point or a spritesheet or what have you. There are a few rough edges like dealing with pointers and gc but to me it's the best of both worlds (the speed of C, and some implicit type checking, and the flexibility of Lua.)

Obviously you could do it the hard way and the other way around with normal modern Lua but it's such a pain in the ass.