The reaction landed on two big points. First, many people do want some of this. Compound assignment, nil coalescing, safe navigation, and a real replacement for Lua’s brittle `a and b or c` pseudo-ternary all got real support. Second, the package as a whole feels to many like language drift, not cleanup. LuaJIT already sits on the Lua 5.1 line for compatibility and performance reasons, while mainstream Lua kept evolving through 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and now 5.5. That means any new syntax decision now is not just sugar. It decides whether LuaJIT stays a mostly pragmatic superset of old Lua or becomes a clearly separate dialect.
A lot of the pushback focused on duplication. Adding `&&` next to `and`, `||` next to `or`, and C-style ternary next to existing Lua idioms struck many readers as importing other languages’ punctuation without solving a pressing problem. Several commenters said the better answer to ternary is an `if ... then ... else ...` expression form, which matches Lua’s existing feel and avoids the readability traps of nested `?:`. Others pushed back that expression-style `if` is a deeper semantic change than it sounds, because Lua would need a clear story for block values and parsing without semicolons. Safe navigation drew a narrower complaint. People liked the capability, but disliked awkward method-call forms like `obj?.:method(...)`.
The sharper underlying point was ecosystem fragmentation. Lua already has an unusually fragmented world for such a small language. PUC Lua versions differ in meaningful ways, LuaJIT froze around 5.1 with its own extensions, and Luau has grown into another major branch. Commenters who work with embedded scripting largely accepted that this is how Lua survives. Hosts pin one version and sit on it forever. But that same pattern makes portable libraries, shared tooling, and cross-project code reuse harder. That is why several people argued the best LuaJIT developer experience win would be better compatibility with PUC Lua and
LuaRocks, not more syntax. The mood was positive about LuaJIT showing signs of life again, but wary that the easiest features to ship are also the ones most likely to make the ecosystem more splintered.