It would really be nice to have bindings for current versions of scripting languages, but bindings get to be a lot of work, even if using automatic tools like swig. It would be really nice, indeed, to have bindings for multiple scripting languages, as GIMP does (Guile, Python, Perl, and I don’t know what else). But a subset of an old version of Lua may suffice.
I may get into setting up Lua scripting sooner rather than later, no small thanks to there being this implementation written in OCaml itself. There is a decent chance that I’ll also remove the original scripting language, so I don’t have to maintain it.
Since Ant stands for ‘Ant is Not TeX’, I could name the new version ‘Luana’, for ‘LUAna is Not Ant’, but probably I would not do that; the particular scripting language isn’t important, and ideally you could have plug-in support for many languages. I’d perhaps leave the original scripting language in place if I didn’t mind maintaining it.
(I also have the idea of linking somehow to Icon, but there isn’t much support for using Icon in that way.)