Why does the Lua VM use bytecode?

[Jonne Ransijn <yoyoyonny@...>]

Why does the Lua VM use bytecode? Wouldn't it be faster if Lua code was converted to assembly (Mainly because of the efficient assembly optimizers out there). I searched on Google and found that Lua and Java were alot slower, and some people claimed that this had to do with the bytecode. While I myself dont think bytecode would be that slow, I am still wondering if Lua would be faster if the VM used assembly. My two questions thus are: Why does the Lua VM use bytecode, and how much faster would it be to use assembly?