is LUA good enough for online judge?

[helloacm]

I am recently learning LUA and thought it would be quicker to learn via submitting solutions in LUA to online judges (e.g. SPOJ)

But the LUA is not very good at handling inputs, isn't it? for example, there is no inbuilt string split function in LUA, which isn't convenient.

How about performance? I doubt it.

[doctorlai]

maybe not. LUA is concise scripting engine written in C and can be integrated quite well with C/C++