I haven’t found many downsides yet. I was already starting to rewrite some things in Awk (which I was drawn to for similar reasons- fast script startup time, simple easy language with good defaults), but Awk (while still also awesome) isn’t really designed for stuff beyond a certain size (no signal handling unless you use a fork, for example)

LuaJIT is missing bignums, ints that aren’t floats, bit operations, and native utf8 handling, but it can pretty easily be extended with libraries, ffi and metatabling. (I actually made a working bignum library that integrates with gmp, but it has a memory leak somewhere and it’s a rabbit hole/bikeshedding project at this point…)

LLM assistance helps hugely and I really like YueScript’s syntax additions. You can point any LLM at a syntax describing webpage and it will pretty much write that language for you…