[abecedarius]

https://github.com/darius/superbench is not a big fancy cross-language shootout, at all, but I tried a few little programs I actually cared about. LuaJIT 'won' in the sense that of the languages I tried it had the best combo of performance and pleasant productivity, informally. I didn't try to quantify the latter.

(Also, no Java because I wouldn't seriously consider it for hacking-for-fun.)

[malkia]

On top of that, luajit is very small/compact, and easily embeddable. FFI alone stands out as a huge win overall!

[alberth]

Where are the results of the benchmark?

[abecedarius]

You can run superopt/benchmark.sh on your machine. I'm away from home and the machine with the various languages installed.