To illustrate this, here's the contorted Lua code from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327201

    local t = setmetatable({}, {
      __index = pcall, __newindex = rawset,
      __call = function(t, i) t[i] = 42 end,
    })
    for i=1,100 do assert(t[i] == true and rawget(t, i) == 42) end

Arguably this exercises only the slow paths of the VM.

A more nuanced take is that Lua has many happy fast paths, whereas Python has some unfortunate semantic baggage that complicates those. Another key issue is the over-reliance on C modules with bindings that expose way too many internals.