not logged in | [Login]
As Lua is a very succinct language, with a minimum of pre-installed libraries, much of the power available to a Lua programmer comes from performing interop calls to external libraries. LuaJIT in particular, provides excellent support for calling external libraries. If what you want is access to a pre-compiled library that is on your target system, then you want to use a FFI Bindings library.
If what you want instead is code that is written 100% in Lua, with no additional library dependencies, then you might want to grab one of the packages listed here.
The criteria are:
Whether your use case is greatly improved through usage of a native package depends on what your criteria are. One of the key benefits might simply be that you do not have to carry and maintain a separate library, written in a different language than Lua.