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Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

LuaJIT 2.0 is an amazing achievement. On the programming language shootout's "flawed benchmarks", LuaJIT outperforms almost every other dynamic language (including JavaScript V8, Python, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, VisualWorks Smalltalk, CPython, PLT Scheme), and is competetive on many benchmarks with highly-optimized language implementations like Sun's JVM, and GHC:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...

Mike Pall wrote LuaJIT and now LuaJIT 2 as essentially solo efforts. Thanks to Google and the other sponsors for helping him continue!

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For an apples-to-apples comparison you'll want to look at the single-threaded performance:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

Spoiler: LuaJit compares even better when comparing single-threaded performance.

Edit: replaced "performs" with "compares", eliminating ambiguity around competitive performance vs clocktime performance

Spoiler: The Lua benchmark submissions are not parallelized.

In my experience, the 1.x releases of LuaJIT have typically made whole programs (not just benchmarks) run 2-3+x faster than standard Lua. Without any other changes. :)

I haven't tried LuaJIT 2 yet, but I'm eagerly waiting for it to get ported to amd64.

The fact that luaJIT is written in assembler makes me wonder how practical an amd64 port. :-\

Most of the VM is written in C. Only the core of the interpreter is written in assembler (generates ~13K of machine code).

And the port of the interpreter to x64 is already done, so it was certainly practical. Porting the rest of the VM and the JIT compiler is what takes most of the time.

Thanks for the clarification!

it would be interesting to see LuaJIT as part of LuaTex.

Super fast desktop publishing FTW !

I was abusing a footnote package, sorting footnotes alphabetically per page, and that took about a second a page on my laptop, but for everything else disk seeks take the majority of TeX's time; once you LaTeX something, and cache the font files in memory, it usually takes under a second or two for anything under 50 pages.

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