Lua is faster than Fortran???

[Stefan Behnel]

sturlamolden, 04.07.2010 05:30:
> 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...

In case anyone's interested, I uploaded a wrapper for LuaJIT2 to PyPI:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lupa

It's written in Cython and heavily borrows from the existing Lua wrapper 
LunaticPython, with a couple of enhancements and a couple of yet missing 
features.

Stefan