[hajile]

Lua was designed in 1993. This was back when MS-DOS was still cutting edge and the 66MHz Pentium was cutting-edge consumer technology.

Even "modern" languages often don't have features like first-class functions, closures, proper tail calls, etc that Lua has had for a very long time now. LuaJIT also trades blows with JS almost certainly making it the fastest or second-fastest dynamic language around.

There's a lot to like about the language (aside from array indexes starting at 1), but I think you are right about the ecosystem and probably right about most of community.

[guenthert]

MS-DOS was never cutting edge, but I came here because I wonder about the performance claims.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

makes it look fairly slow, competing with Ruby, rather then JS.

[hajile]

He removed LuaJIT from the benchmark opting to use the much slower Lua (Lua is used for small embedded stuff and LuaJIT is used for high-performance stuff with a popular recent example being the game Balatro). Here's the Vercel version which uses LuaJIT. I have no idea if the benchmarks were deoptimized by him (as he did to several language he thought "were too fast").

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-ja...

LuaJIT used to have a performance comparison page, but it was removed a couple years ago apparently. It shows that LuaJIT is an average of around 16x faster than standard Lua (geomean). Very impressive considering it was written by just one guy for years (Mike Pall) and even more impressive when you consider that the JIT is only around 0.5mb (compare that with v8 which comes in at somewhere around 28mb IIRC).

https://web.archive.org/web/20230605114058/http://luajit.org...

[igouy]

> I have no idea if …

You have no idea.

> He removed LuaJIT

LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1

The benchmarks game shows Lua 5.4.7

[hajile]

> LuaJIT supports Lua 5.1

From what I understand, LuaJIT was removed before Lua 5.2 was released, so that wasn't the reason.

https://luajit.org/extensions.html

LuaJIT supports most of the features of Lua versions after 5.1 with the major missing feature being 64-bit integers, but like modern JS JITs, it actually uses 31/32-bit ints internally most of the time. Even in Lua 5.4 code, you are using implicit rather than explicit ints 99% of the time.

I haven't run the code to see, but I'm willing to bet that you can copy all the current benchmark code into LuaJIT and it'll run just fine.

> You have no idea.

I know with certainty that deoptimizations were applied to at least some scripts. Here's three examples for Common Lisp, StandardML, and Haskell over some time.

https://zerf.gitlab.io/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Arc...

https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe...

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ajhc-0.8.0.4/src/example...

Here's a C example from Mike Pall (presumably the same guy who created LuaJIT) that also got the deopt treatment by Isaac Gouy.

https://github.com/lemire/ComputerLanguageBenchmark/blob/fbe...

It's not a question of if this happens -- only if it affects Lua (I've never checked).

[mardifoufs]

Wait, that's news to me. Last time I checked, maybe 2 years ago, luajit supported some Lua >5.2 features. But, just a handful of those. Is it truly supporting most of the newer features nowadays?

[igouy]

> extensions.html

On that page, what words do you think support your claim "was removed before Lua 5.2 was released".

> I know with certainty

I made those code changes. I wrote de-optimized as a joke.