For the past year I exclusively use Lua for my side projects. And I use it with certain self-imposed restrictions:
* no Luarocks
* no native libraries
More details: http://akkartik.name/freewheeling
* no Luarocks
* no native libraries
More details: http://akkartik.name/freewheeling
Here's how my apps' version check works, based on suggestions from the LÖVE Discord (but mistakes are mine): https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/template-live/tree/9cddb20b96aa1... I don't use t.version in conf.lua anymore in Freewheeling Apps (though my early apps are not perfect)
I've talked about this before, but I think the only way to do versioning is the way everyone does it nowadays. Have a directory, with a wrapper around the dvcs/(Commits/ Tags/) and then a subdirectory for a "git workingset", And then you Import("url",{tag="",commit="",req="x.y.z"}), it should be fast because you're just doing io.open($REPOHOME/$URL/TAG/$TAG/$COMMIT/x/y/z) which just gets dropped to require() as normal. of course, add LÖVE to the mix and I just don't know. love should have mandatorily a love-VERSION as the command.
That way lies npm and left-pad.
Tools encourage behaviors. I avoid tools that encourage behaviors I want to avoid.
For native libs it's a wild west and success depends a lot on your environment. Sometimes the lib is being built with -Werror and fails if you're using more recent compiler, sometimes include paths are not resolved correctly using pkgconfig or similar and so on.
[1] I wouldn't say Lua/Python/Javascript has no types. They just lack types for variables rather than values. Forth, on the other hand, has no types period.