This article mentions Janet as a possible "Lua replacement," which is unrealistic. It's hard to overcome Lua's inertia and familiarity.
But! If you're in the market for an embeddable-or-not scripting language, and you are turned off by Lua's various idiosyncrasies, I would encourage you to give Janet a closer look. It quickly became my favorite scripting language after I discovered it about a year ago.
It's great for embedding in a larger app -- it has a simple C API, and it's distributed as a single .h/.c file pair. It has a small standard library (the core composite types are immutable and mutable maps and vectors, rather than linked lists). Its first-class support for PEGs makes it a great choice for text-manipulation scripts. It can also compile statically-linked binaries (linking in the interpreter/runtime/gc) so it's easy to distribute Janet programs, unlike most interpreted languages. Binaries that only use the stdlib weigh about 1mb, if memory serves.
The language is sane: zero-indexed arrays, simple module/import system, variables are block-scoped by default (the language even distinguishes between bindings and reassignable variables). And it has non-hygienic "classic" lisp macros, so you can write helpers to do anything you can think of -- great for making a little embedded DSL.
No LuaJIT, though, and no metatables. And an extremely sparse package ecosystem. But it's pretty easy to interop with C/C++ libraries, so your "ecosystem" is actually broader than it looks (if you're willing to generate some bindings).
If it's a C program, I like to embed Chicken Scheme (alternatively, one could embed Gambit, or Guile). They are all pretty easy to embed with simple FFI and C APIs.
But! If you're in the market for an embeddable-or-not scripting language, and you are turned off by Lua's various idiosyncrasies, I would encourage you to give Janet a closer look. It quickly became my favorite scripting language after I discovered it about a year ago.
It's great for embedding in a larger app -- it has a simple C API, and it's distributed as a single .h/.c file pair. It has a small standard library (the core composite types are immutable and mutable maps and vectors, rather than linked lists). Its first-class support for PEGs makes it a great choice for text-manipulation scripts. It can also compile statically-linked binaries (linking in the interpreter/runtime/gc) so it's easy to distribute Janet programs, unlike most interpreted languages. Binaries that only use the stdlib weigh about 1mb, if memory serves.
The language is sane: zero-indexed arrays, simple module/import system, variables are block-scoped by default (the language even distinguishes between bindings and reassignable variables). And it has non-hygienic "classic" lisp macros, so you can write helpers to do anything you can think of -- great for making a little embedded DSL.
No LuaJIT, though, and no metatables. And an extremely sparse package ecosystem. But it's pretty easy to interop with C/C++ libraries, so your "ecosystem" is actually broader than it looks (if you're willing to generate some bindings).