Love it. Use case is difficult to grasp at first, but seems to be somewhere less powerful than LuaJIT, but with typing; and more powerful than Typed Lua, but with the same typing?

Lua is perfect as a small embeddable dynamic language so why a derivative? Ravi extends Lua with static typing for improved performance when JIT compilation is enabled.

There are other attempts to add static typing to Lua - e.g. Typed Lua but these efforts are mostly about adding static type checks in the language while leaving the VM unmodified.

Of course there is the fantastic LuaJIT implementation. Ravi has a different goal compared to LuaJIT. Ravi prioritizes ease of maintenance and support, language safety, and compatibility with Lua 5.3, over maximum performance.