…I was hoping for something to build “native” lua scripts, but there was not. I’m guessing the word “native” meant something different here than the traditional “system native” machine code but I’m unsure what it meant… All this was was just instancing a lua interpreter and running it, there was no building something native other than normal interpreter stuff?

I agree. I expected this to compile/link a lua script to native, executable bytecode. Alternatively, provide a locally installable runtime + file association that would let someone execute the scripts directly from a shell on the fly, like double-clicking JS and VBS files on Windows.