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"Current [Pawn] version: 4.0.4733 (2012-06-22)"

Lua and LuaJIT are updated fairly regularly and target the same "fast, embeddable, typeless, bytecode-compiled scripting language" use-case.

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Be careful of getting drawn in to "newer is better".

You're right - newer is not necessarily better. But active development and recent releases are usually a good proxy for at least a chance of further improvements.

Newer might not be but maintained and popular definitely is.

Pawn faster.

http://codeplea.com/game-scripting-languages

It doesn't look like that tested LuaJIT. The JIT part or the faster interpreter.

Assuming apples-to-apples JIT technology, Pawn would still be faster because it's a barebones coding environment. Its semantics are roughly similar to C, but with even fewer features. The only definite way to outdo that is with something like Terra[0] where the program has meta-level control over its own compilation and execution.

[0] http://terralang.org/

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