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I can tell you from my own experience that luajit, which also targets 5.1 compatibility, is _significantly_ faster than Lua proper. In using it I've never missed 5.2+ features. So I imagine luau has the same thing going for it.

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I would expect Luau to be significantly slower than LuaJIT though, because Luau doesn’t include a JIT compiler.

True, but they claim to have gotten as fast as LuaJIT in many cases and, important for their use case, JIT doesn't work on some platforms (iOS): https://luau-lang.org/performance

> On some workloads it can match the performance of LuaJIT interpreter which is written in highly specialized assembly.

Note how it says: "match the performance of the LuaJIT interpreter" (emphasis mine). LuaJIT basically has two parts: an interpreter in handcrafted assembly which is quite a bit faster than the standard Lua VM, and the actual JIT, which is even faster. IIRC on iOS the JIT is not allowed but the interpreter is still there.

Good catch! I missed the word interpreter in there.

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