Questions tagged [luajit]

Overview

LuaJIT is a high-performance, Just-In-Time(JIT) implementation by Mike Pall for the Lua programming language. It has been successfully used as a scripting middleware in games, 3D modelers, numerical simulations, trading platforms and many other specialty applications. It combines high flexibility with high performance and an unmatched low memory footprint: less than 125K for the virtual machine(VM) plus less than 85K for the JIT compiler (on x86).

LuaJIT has been in continuous development since 2005. It's widely considered to be one of the fastest dynamic language implementations. It has outperformed other dynamic languages on many cross-language benchmarks since its first release — often by a substantial margin. In 2009 other dynamic language VMs started to catch up with the performance of LuaJIT 1.x. Well, I couldn't let that slide. ;-)

2009 also marks the first release of the long-awaited LuaJIT 2.0. The whole VM has been rewritten from the ground up and relentlessly optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed interpreter, written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler. An innovative trace compiler is integrated with advanced, SSA-based optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This allows a substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic language features.

It's destined to break into the performance range traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.

Compatibility

LuaJIT implements the full set of language features defined by Lua 5.1. The virtual machine is API- and ABI-compatible to the standard Lua interpreter and can be deployed as a drop-in replacement.

LuaJIT offers more performance, at the expense of portability. It currently runs on all popular operating systems based on x86 or x64 CPUs (Linux, Windows, OSX etc.) or embedded systems based on ARM (Android, iOS) or PPC/e500v2 CPUs. Other platforms will be supported in the future, based on user demand and sponsoring.