[copx]

>I think you forgot to turn on your optimizer.

I did not. I used Pelles C to compile it (with the optimizer turned on). I am not surprised that GCC managed to eliminate the pointless loop entirely in this situation. In fact I was happy that both Pelles C and LuaJIT did not realize that the whole loop was pointless and thus I did not have to come up with a more complex example.

The primary point of this was to show that JIT compilers can optimize away hash table access and dynamic typing in hot loops, not a code generation competition between LuaJIT and GCC.

I am a pretty big LuaJIT fanboy and not even I would claim that Lua compiled with LuaJIT can compete against C compiled by current versions of GCC with all optimizations turned on, at least not in most real-world cases. However, it does get amazingly close, most of the time within an order of magnitude, which means that I personally do not need to use C anymore.