Comparing SPUR [Microsoft Research VM] to PyPy
morepypy.blogspot.com
morepypy.blogspot.com
Please, someone bring me back down to earth before I start reading papers again instead of studying for my exams...
by all means, read more papers ;) study just enough to get a decent grade on your exams. if you're into reading academic papers and find them enriching, they can be a far more rewarding experience than studying for exams (and they might actually indirectly help you with future exams, heh)
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
On both reddit and lambda-the-ultimate; it has all the important stuff. Also there's the shootout stuff already posted as a reply to you. And you can download LuaJIT2 and experiment yourself.
My impression is that the developer is reading the important papers and putting the theory into practice. It's innovative in the sense of "new stuff that is made useful".
Guys like the SPUR team at MSR on the other hand are trying new ideas and writing these papers. That's innovation in the sense of "a change in the thought process for doing something".
Both are important and each one would be useless without the other.