NodeMCU - Enabling Lua 5.3

I could write this as a 1 line post, but I'm going to pad it out a little.

So, if you've ever used Lua on a NodeMCU device, like an ESP-8266, you know that it defaults to Lua 5.1. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but if you read the whitepaper, you'll see that 5.3 has some neat features. But the question I couldn't find the answer to is: How do you cause the project to compile with Lua 5.3.

Easy IOT with ESP8266 and MicroPython using sockets instead of HTML

The problem I've always had with the ESP8266 was that all of the examples showed wrapping the controls in HTML. So - you'll start up a small web server, then decode the GET from the client and run your control logic from there. I don't like that.

I can see certain advantages, if you want to manually control your outputs from your browser, and you want to actually see the state of your inputs, it's great. Have at it. But I don't want to do that - at least not all  of the time. I want an easy way to read the inputs and control the outputs without having to log in with a browser or use some funky CURL.