Well I looked at Luabind a bit further and I believe because Lua is a vital scripting language for games, and in general, and given that Boost is pretty essential for C++, I doubt it's going anywhere. I'm actually hoping Boost officially supports it as they do with Python, perhaps merge it. So after looking at LB further, I decided to pick it up. My only complaint has to be lack of an API reference. Rasterbar claims to have this, and although useful, is pretty much a tutorial.

I'm kind of wondering how to manipulate arrays and strings though. Yeah, there's vector but that seems to be bigger in size than a raw array. As for strings, there's std::string, but I want each string entry only 128 characters per dialogue entry. I really don't prefer using memory meant for a 2 million character string for a simple 128 character string. Again, I mean an array of 128-character string entries. An array of std::strings would like result in more memory used than necessary

There should in fact be no overhead at all for sufficiently short strings, or 4-8 bytes for other strings.

And if you did have a million strings, the overhead is still (likely) negligible.

I agree with you there. The documentation lacks detail. Though maybe it's because the documentation is targeted for those whom have experience with Lua's C API (I barely touched it). Some of the functions are vaguely documented, and I had to search through some development blogs to find out how to use them.