LuaJIT is significantly faster than vanilla Lua. Whats the catch?
LuaJIT 1 is indeed faster, between a factor of 2 to 4 times faster for typical programs, and even better for tight computational loops. However, to do its magic it must compile Lua bytecodes ‘just in time’ to machine code, and currently only x86 is supported. So in particular, it will not build natively on 64-bit i86_64 platforms, although runs fine as a 32-bit executable on those systems. The recent release of LuaJIT 2 is exciting, and establishes LuaJIT as the fastest dynanamic language implementation. Development has begun on a x64 port. There are some differences you should be aware of. LuaJIT is stricter than vanilla Lua and does not support the old Lua 5.0 way of dealing with variable number of arguments.
The recent release of LuaJIT 2 establishes LuaJIT as the fastest dynamic language implementation. Both 32 and 64 bit Intel processors are supported, and performance can be comparable to compiled code. There are some differences you should be aware of. LuaJIT is stricter than vanilla Lua and does not support the old Lua 5.0 way of dealing with a variable number of arguments. LuaJIT does not support the dumping and reading of bytecode, which means that libraries such as Lanes cannot work with it currently. This applies to other extensions like Pluto which need deep integration with the Lua implementation.
