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Comment by sobersombrero | Hacker News Reader

I've used luajit. It's unsupported software. If it works, great. If not, you're screwed. The original Lua may be ten times slower than luajit, but anyone can understand and debug it. That's worth something.

It's a shame luajit never created a community beyond its creator. FFI sure was nice.

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> It's unsupported software. If it works, great. If not, you're screwed.

Not entirely sure how you got to that conclusion. Afaik there are no know bugs. All issues on https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues are related to adding further optimizations or otherwise improve LuaJIT. In the last year bugs have been fixed almost instantly after they have been posted to the LuaJIT mailing list. So while I'm still a bit sad that Mike is on his way out, I wouldn't call LuaJIT unsupported. It's still a great choice.

In the last year bugs have been fixed almost instantly

That's good to hear. Perhaps LuaJIT isn't "unsupported", but it does seem to be "in maintenance mode".

I would love to see, not just bug fixes to LuaJIT, but ongoing improvements. Unfortunately with Mike having stepped down, and there being no successor, nobody is making these improvements and nobody is driving the project forward.

For example, will the new garbage collector [1] ever be implemented? Will LuaJIT remain stuck at version 5.1 while PUC Lua continues to add new features?

[1]: http://wiki.luajit.org/New-Garbage-Collector

Mike Pall may not be maintaining Luajit any longer, but he still plays some sort of role preserving his legacy - shutting down genuine problems as wontfix. Here's one example:

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/203

This is not helpful.

I stand by my assessment that luajit is unsupported software. If it works for you - all the best.

What's wrong with not wanting the LuaJIT codebase to have a dependency on the C++ the runtime?

Just one of many issues not addressed. This code base is effectively frozen.

If one heads over to GitHub to check some recently closed issues and recent commits one will discover that there are people who can understand and debug LuaJIT issues.

LuaJIT is not magic, it's a software. Very neat and tightly written but it's still just a bunch of C/assembly/Lua code.

Written by one human, and thus other humans can understand it too.

In theory you're right. But it's dense terse code with very little documentation. Some people can fix obvious problems around the edges, but no one would tackle a serious refactoring, porting to more recent version of Lua or adding a new feature.

Haven't you heard? The rumor goes that Mike Pall is actually an alien robot from another planet - which kind of would make sense, if you ask me.

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