Lua is faster than Fortran???

[Luis M. González]

On Jul 4, 12:30 am, sturlamolden <sturlamol... at yahoo.no> wrote:
> 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.

You should read this thread: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851
There, you'll see this subject discussed and explained at length.
Pay special attention to Mike Pall's comments (he is the creator of
Luajit) and his opinion about python and pypy.
You will read also about other projects, specially new javascript
engines such as Mozila's Tracemonkey (the authors participate in this
thread) and the pypy folks.
It is a very good read for anyone interested in the subject. Very
recommended!
Good luck!

Luis