I recently needed to build a custom Lua interpreter in Go. The exact reasons aren’t important for this blog post, but neither the reference implementation — which I will be referring to as “C Lua” throughout this article — nor the other open source Go Lua intepreters I could find were a good fit for my needs. Building a Lua interpreter ended up being a rather enjoyable months-long side quest. I’ve had a number of folks ask me to write about the experience since these sorts of projects usually highlight interesting aspects of both the implementation language and the interpreted language. So here we are!