Lua is faster than Fortran???

[bart.c]

"sturlamolden" <sturlamolden at yahoo.no> wrote in message 
news:daa07acb-d525-4e32-91f0-16490027cc42 at w12g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
>
> I was just looking at Debian's benchmarks. It seems LuaJIT is now (on
> median) beating Intel Fortran!
>
> C (gcc) is running the benchmarks faster by less than a factor of two.
> Consider that Lua is a dynamically typed scripting language very
> similar to Python.
>
> LuaJIT also runs the benchmarks faster than Java 6 server, OCaml, and
> SBCL.
>
> I know it's "just a benchmark" but this has to count as insanely
> impressive. Beating Intel Fortran with a dynamic scripting language,
> how is that even possible? And what about all those arguments that
> dynamic languages "have to be slow"?
>
> If this keeps up we'll need a Python to Lua bytecode compiler very
> soon. And LuaJIT 2 is rumoured to be much faster than the current...
>
> Looking at median runtimes, here is what I got:
>
>   gcc               1.10
>
>   LuaJIT            1.96
>
>   Java 6 -server    2.13
>   Intel Fortran     2.18
>   OCaml             3.41
>   SBCL              3.66
>
>   JavaScript V8     7.57
>
>   PyPy             31.5
>   CPython          64.6
>   Perl             67.2
>   Ruby 1.9         71.1
>
> The only comfort for CPython is that Ruby and Perl did even worse.

I didn't see the same figures; LuaJIT seem to be 4-5 times as slow as one of 
the C's, on average. Some benchmarks were slower than that.

But I've done my own brief tests and I was quite impressed with LuaJIT which 
seemed to outperform C on some tests.

I'm developing my own language and LuaJIT is a new standard to beat for this 
type of language. However, Lua is quite a lightweight language with 
minimalist data types, it doesn't suit everybody.

I suspect also the Lua JIT compiler optimises some of the dynamicism out of 
the language (where it can see, for example, that something is always going 
to be a number, and Lua only has one numeric type with a fixed range), so 
that must be a big help.

-- 
Bartc