Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked into heka a while back and was turned off by its seeming reliance on lua scripts for almost every feature. It just seemed overcomplicated to deploy and maintain for a Go app as a result, and I didn't understand why all that functionality didn't come built in. Is this unfair? Perhaps I misunderstood the docs.
If you want to write your own plugins, you can do them in lua or Go. Lua is the recommended way for most types - I think matching is supposed to be faster, and also then you don't need to recompile the heka binary. If you don't want to write your own plugins, you'll never interact with lua.
Don't you need to ship all those builtin lua plugins around with your deployment of heka though? That was what turned me off - most of the other options can be used with a binary + config file.