This is luac, the Lua compiler.
There are man pages for it in both nroff and html in ../../doc.

luac translates Lua programs into binary files that can be loaded and executed
with lua_dofile in C or with dofile in Lua.
The main advantages of pre-compiling chunks are: faster loading, protecting
source code from user changes, and off-line syntax error detection.
luac can also be used to learn about the Lua virtual machine.

Here are the options that luac understands:

  -        process stdin
  -l       list
  -o file  output file (default is "luac.out")
  -p       parse only
  -s       strip debug information
  -v       show version information

luac is also an example of how to use the internals of Lua (politely).
