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Perl is usually installed in most Unix or Unix-like systems. Lua not that much. And the size difference though proportionally big (5x) it's insignificant in modern systems (1M vs 0.2M). Also consider that Perl is more featureful language and switching to Lua could mean more work for the devs if some of them are required to be implemented.

Perl does not cross-compile so without applying non-upstream patches.

And Perl comes with OpenBSD.

What would the better higher-level scripting language be though? I'd love to use something better than sh.