[binary132]

> How can it beat C

It doesn’t have the Lua to C interop overhead. You can obviously ameliorate that overhead by working on batches in C, but if you have a large and complicated dataset in Lua and need to iterate through it in C, the overhead is constantly additive so it’s certainly not just “the performance of C” when you step into C, necessarily.

If on the other hand you’re dropping into C to do something like decode a compressed stream, then the interop overhead is negligible compared to the work done in C. However, that interop overhead will be present wherever you put the boundary layer....