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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
