While Lua the little script language is not as well known as Python, it is popular in the game industry (World of Warcraft uses it to drive client UI) and there is even a sourceforge-like website just for Lua, LuaForge.net.

For persisting Lua data types, there is Pluto which converts any Lua data type (even functions, closures, and threads) into an octet sequence which can be written out to a file (i.e. game save/restore), sent over the net (LuaSocket), or inserted into databases using LuaSQL (ODBC, ADO, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, JDBC, PostgresSQL supported).

For my recent need, persisting tens of thousands of small Lua tables to local storage, I used lgdbm (tar.gz file) with QDBM which I've been using in other projects instead of gdbm for performance. I am not releasing the source code to my Lua binding for QDBM (lqdbm?) because only minor modifications are needed. I'll do that when and if I expose other functionalities of QDBM like B+ tree.