Oh boy, I feel you, having no buttons is such a PITA. I've mapped my caps lock and windows button to LMB and RMB for years, works like a charm!

Could you summarize the contents of this video so we don't have to watch it?

Well, there you are: https://github.com/MicroLua/MicroLua

That sounds like something the size of an ESP32.

Assuming your flash allows XIP (execute in place) so all that memory is available for your lua interpreter data, you should at least be able to run some code, but don't expect to run any heavy full applications on that. I don't know Berry but it sounds like a better fit for the scale of your device.

But sure, why not give it a try: Lua is usually easy to port to whatever platform, so just spin it up and see how it works for you!

I have been developing Lua-heavy embedded products as a freelancer for about 20 years now, including VoIP devices, home automation controllers, industrial routers, digital video recorders, and more. These systems typically consist of a Linux kernel, some libc implementation, the lua interpreter and a few 3d party libs support libs to help building the app. The Lua apps ranges from 30k to 100k lines of code, depending on the application. Some of these devices can be considered 'small' in 2025 terms: 8MB of flash, 64MB of ram. Lua is doing great here.

All of these products are still alive today, actively supported and making my customers good money.

Some things come very natural to Lua: Lua <=> C interfacing is a breeze, and while some modern languages are still struggling to figure out how to do proper async, Lua has been able to do this for decades. The language itself is minimal and simple but surprisingly powerful - a few smart constructs like coroutines, closures and metatables allow for a lot of different paradigms.

For new projects at this scale, I would still choose Lua + C/C++ as my stack. Over the last few years I have been visiting other ecosystems to see what I'm missing out on (Elixir, Rust, Nim), and while I learned to love all of those, I found none of them as powerful, low-friction and flexible as Lua.

I'm afraid it would: in 2002 I was involved with the development of a very early wifi AP implementation at Freehosting; this was running uclinux on an ARM7 with a pretty bare kernel and the whole OS fitting in under a megabyte. Booting was already pretty much instantaneous then.