Leverage Lua for simple actions
First - thanks for making it. 100% less coffeescript is welcome, and this is just the right opportunity to get me motivated to learn GO.
Now for the issue itself -- If you haven't seen it, you should take a look at Heka. It's obviously an entirely different tool from this, but they have done some incredible work with integrating Lua. By leveraging Lua's JIT strengths, you can customize it's processing on the fly by pushing lua modules into it, with great protections against those modules bringing down the whole system.
Integrating a similar concept here would be really powerful. Is that something you're open to for this project, or do you envision it as staying 100% Go?
I've absolutely been thinking about how to take advantage of an embedded runtime, specifically Lua. In fact, I was inspired to create this project while researching Heka.
As far as when or how something like that happens, I'm not sure. So for the time being hal will stay 100% Go, but that will surely not be forever.
If/when the project develops to that point, it looks like there's a vm for go now - https://github.com/Shopify/go-lua