RE: [ANN] LuaJIT 1.0.3

["Nick Trout" <nick@...>]

Nice. I think this has the potential to be one of the most important
tools to appear in Lua and one of the biggest steps forward for the
language since Lua 5.0. I'd very much like to see MIPS (R5900/mipsel)
for PS2 and (later) PPC (G5) for PS3 and Xbox 360. I'm not sure what the
cheapest/best entry point would be for these processors, perhaps for
MIPS, a handheld and for PPC a Mac. You'll be able to get G5 Macs very
cheap soon ;).

	PS2: http://ps2.gamespy.com/articles/500/500485p1.html

IMHO I'd tackle a few 32 bits architectures before going to 64. Not sure
what benefit you'd get from SIMD enhancements at Lua level. SIMD is
probably done better through Dynasm as some extension library, e.g.
vector or colour classes, scalar arrays, vector arrays etc. Perhaps you
could provide a library where you can create data template where you
specify type, stride, groups/structs, array size from which platform
specific code can be generated and LuaJIT know how to use this library
efficiently.

This could open Lua to whole new range of performance sensitive
scripting applications, as people have already realized (plug-ins for
painting packages, modeling packages, games etc).

I think if LHFs ltoken library can be refined to provide syntax
extensions for the language, Lua will be a lot more useful on
limited/embedded systems. Lua, although not nearly as bad as other
languages <cough>Java</cough>, still uses a relatively large amount of
memory to do some simple things. E.g. if you want to namespace data in
tables you cannot use "local" for efficiency (for the items in the
table). It would be nice to be able to add const tables (like enum) and
substitute values at compile time. This saves keeping tables around at
runtime (which saves memory and table lookups). Being able to lock/make
const tables might also be a hint you could pass on to LuaJIT. This is
just one example, you could do all kinds of modifications with the
language and link these to optimization hints.

Nick

-----Original Message-----
From: lua-bounces@bazar2.conectiva.com.br
[mailto:lua-bounces@bazar2.conectiva.com.br] On Behalf Of Mike Pall
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 7:49 AM
To: Lua list
Subject: [ANN] LuaJIT 1.0.3

Hi,

this is the initial public release of LuaJIT,
a Just-In-Time (JIT) Compiler for Lua 5.1.

Please visit the project home page for more info:

  http://luajit.luaforge.net/

LuaJIT is based on Lua 5.1 alpha (plus some fixes). All the
usual caveats about early releases of Lua 5.1 apply here, too.

The first releases of LuaJIT targets x86 (i386+) CPUs only.
LuaJIT has been tested on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
and Windows.

Any feedback is appreciated. Thank you!

Bye,
     Mike