The benefits I was referring to are being able to write fast, correct code easily. Other languages that allow one to do that include D, Go, Clojure, and Scala. If you want a scripting language, you're stuck with LuaJIT for now, but at least to me that's not an important distinction for anything I'd want to do with LuaJIT.
LuaJIT comes with warnings like "Callbacks are slow" and "The following operations are currently not compiled and may exhibit suboptimal performance, especially when used in inner loops:" which pushes it further down the list for me.
