some months ago in a sprint, we finally both sat down together with Nico to fight with lua, and at some point stumbled upon this https://github.com/rrthomas/lua-stdlib --[[ This is a collection of Lua libraries for Lua 5.1 and 5.2. You can load the standard set with require "std" ]]--- then i found out about luarocks, which is analog to ruby gems and python pips http://luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/ and from there, other interesting libraries * https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua This function transform any Lua table into a human-readable representation of that table. The objective here is human understanding (i.e. for debugging), not serialization or compactness. (Dedicated to Nico, a python programmer horrified by lua being unable to print(table)) * https://code.google.com/p/luno/ O projeto Luno tem o objetivo de prover API's para uso com a linguagem de programação Lua que visem a facilitar a execução de tarefas corriqueiras mas que não estão diretamente implementadas pela biblioteca padrão do Lua. Luno conta com os módulos luno.string, luno.table e luno.io. Esses módulos provêem funções extras para manipular strings (trim, split, join, charAt, ...), io (getTextFromFile, ...), tabelas (imprimir tabelas, concatenar, ...). O módulo luno.util provê funções de uso geral como cópia (deep copy) e impressão (deep print) de variáveis. finally, i found the following blogpost enlightening, it's a thorough summary of differences and unexpected things, very helpful for me, dealing with lua for the first time http://notebook.kulchenko.com/programming/lua-good-different-bad-and-ugly-p… hope that helps someone,