According to this benchmark of Lua vs QuickJS[1] the Dino language[2] is supposedly much faster than Lua. It also seems to check most of my boxes?

[1] https://sabotage-linux.neocities.org/blog/9/

[2] https://github.com/dino-lang/dino

Hmmm, this looks pretty interesting. Shame that it didn't take off, and now it looks pretty much dead.

Seems that the ones with a genuine ability to innovate are always the least motivated to either start their project, follow through with it, or share it when finished, beyond a doctoral thesis that gets them a PhD they never really end up using. I wonder why...

Maybe AngelScript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngelScript) could be a good fit, used in a bunch of released games, so seems to be good enough for real work.

Wren (https://wren.io/) is another interesting language, but I haven't even tried it myself, but on the surface it seems to match. Edit: Scratch that, Wren isn't actually statically typed, but somehow I have it saved in my bookmarks as one.

Maybe you need to play with Nelua? Read more at https://nelua.io

My RSS reader just showed me https://teal-language.org/