The only reason to pre-compile chunks, really, is because you'vestripped the parser out of your lua vm. byte code is less portable,harder to deal with (as you've found), and not really faster to loadI disagree. In my experience loading compiled chunks is (much) faster than loading source code. In some quick tests I did with Lua 5.2 (debug-stripped) compiled code can load up to 4 times faster than non-compiled code. With the debug info not stripped out, loading compiled code is a bit slower. But, again, it's still noticeably faster than loading regular scripts.
Ashwin.