If you were going to do this properly, of course, rather than as a hack,
you'd write a custom Lua interpreter that ran in native code. For
example, PICBIT is a Scheme interpreter that runs on a PIC18, and claims
to get about 37000 bytecodes per second on a 40MHz device. NanoVM is a
Java VM that runs on the ATmega8, which claims about 20000 standard Java
bytecodes per second on an 8MHz part. So running Lua on one of these
things is certainly quite possible.
That's what I was thinking too, having a special version of the VM interpreter would make more sense in this scenario. Doable, but quite a bit of work, too. Still probably easier than porting LLVM to your own virtual machine or writing an interpreter for a 32-bit CPU on an 8-bit CPU :)
Best,
Bogdan
