Lua is faster than Fortran???

[David Cournapeau]

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 11:23 PM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
> On 04 Jul 2010 04:15:57 GMT
> Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> "Need" is a bit strong. There are plenty of applications where if your
>> code takes 0.1 millisecond to run instead of 0.001, you won't even
>> notice. Or applications that are limited by the speed of I/O rather than
>> the CPU.
>
> Which is 99% of the real-world applications if you factor out the code
> already written in C or other compiled languages.

This may be true, but there are areas where the percentage is much
lower. Not everybody uses python for web development. You can be a
python fan, be reasonably competent in the language, and have good
reasons to wish for python to be one order of magnitude faster.

I find LUA quite interesting: instead of providing a language simple
to develop in, it focuses heavily on implementation simplicity. Maybe
that's the reason why it could be done at all by a single person.

David