Richard, given you want to use it standalone, resource constraints may
be your biggest problem, so use either the Arduino IDE or the SDK.

The excess of choices is typical of open and popular development.  ;-)

Lua is okay for getting started.

Lua is tokenised and then executed as byte-code, so it is a reasonably
fast interpreter.  The byte-code can also be written to flash, which
may decrease startup time.  It is larger than the source in my tests.

Lua modules for GPIO and other peripherals are SDK C code in the
build, so they are already efficient and fast.

What kills Lua for larger projects is heap memory management, and the
size of flash.

Heap memory management is a matter of understanding and skill; knowing
the effects of code, using locals, and cleaning up.

Size of flash is a matter of replacing the flash chip, removing
build modules you don't need, and trimming your source code.

For removing build modules, I've used the Frightanic custom build
service.

http://frightanic.com/nodemcu-custom-build/

This has the effect of both reducing heap and flash allocation.

--=20
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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