LUA_NUMBER can safely be changed to an integer type, Lua is designed for extreme portablity from the ground up.
If by stock Lua, you mean lua.c, it is partly intended as a minimal demonstration of how you can embed Lua the library. The authors encourage users to modify the VM to better fit their use case, and changing the number type really is trivial.
> Again, maybe I'm just nitpicking but my main point was that lua, scripting language or not, just didn't seem better suited than C at writing device drivers.
As I said, I'm mostly unqualified to answer that. It's harder to shoot yourself in the foot when using Lua, which may make things easier at the prototyping stage.
If by stock Lua, you mean lua.c, it is partly intended as a minimal demonstration of how you can embed Lua the library. The authors encourage users to modify the VM to better fit their use case, and changing the number type really is trivial.
> Again, maybe I'm just nitpicking but my main point was that lua, scripting language or not, just didn't seem better suited than C at writing device drivers.
As I said, I'm mostly unqualified to answer that. It's harder to shoot yourself in the foot when using Lua, which may make things easier at the prototyping stage.
Maybe having LPeg[0] could be of some use too.
[0] http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html