[ANN] LuaJIT-2.0.0-beta1

[Mike Pall <mikelu-0910@...>]

It's almost midnight on Halloween here. This is the perfect time
to release long-awaited, almost mythical open source software ... ;-)

Yes, here it is: the first public release of LuaJIT 2.0!

Here is a link to the home page:
  http://luajit.org/luajit.html

And a direct link to the download page:
  http://luajit.org/download.html

What is LuaJIT?
---------------

LuaJIT is a Just-In-Time (JIT) Compiler for Lua. It's fully
compatible with standard Lua 5.1 and can significantly boost the
performance of your Lua programs.

LuaJIT is open source software, released under the MIT/X license.

LuaJIT builds out-of-the-box on all popular x86 operating systems
(Linux, Windows, OSX etc.). It runs fine as a 32 bit application
under x64-based systems, too.

This is a BETA TEST release -- the current status and the list of
known issues are shown here: http://luajit.org/status.html
Please report any problems you may find with this release. Thank you!

What's new in LuaJIT 2.0
------------------------

The VM of LuaJIT 2.0 has been rewritten from the ground up and is
relentlessly optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed
interpreter, written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.

An innovative trace compiler is integrated with advanced, SSA-based
optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This allows a
substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic language
features. It's destined to break into the performance range
traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.

Performance on numerical code is already quite competitive (see below).
Support for other areas (e.g. string functions) is still a bit weak.
Although the VM supports all Lua language features and standard library
functions, the JIT compiler is not complete (yet) and falls back to the
interpreter in some cases. All of this works transparently, so unless
you use -jv, you'll probably never notice. The interpreter is quite
fast, too (near the performance of the LuaJIT 1.x JIT compiler).

Preliminary benchmark numbers are shown below -- performance will
likely improve during the beta test phase. These numbers are mainly
intended to give you an idea about the typical speedups you can expect,
depending on the type of application. Your mileage may vary.

Ok, so thanks to everyone for their patience! A big thank you goes to
the alpha testers. And now, please have fun with it -- Happy Halloween!

--Mike

Relative speedup over Lua 5.1.4 on standard Lua benchmarks
(e.g. 11.9 means it's almost twelve times faster):

md5           152.7  |  mandelbrot   13.4  |  nsieve        4.7  |
array3d       101.5  |  pidigits     12.4  |  partialsums   4.1  |
array          73.5  |  random       12.2  |  chameneos     3.8  |
methcall       28.8  |  nsievebits   12.0  |  recursive     3.5  |
nsievebits     28.0  |  nestedloop   11.9  |  knucleotide   3.4  |
matrix         23.0  |  lists         9.3  |  binarytrees   2.7  |
spectralnorm   21.4  |  cheapconcr    5.5  |  meteor        2.0  |
fannkuch       20.9  |  cheapconcw    5.4  |  revcomp       1.8  |
nbody          14.8  |  fasta         5.3  |  sumfile       1.5  |

SciMark scores on a 3 GHz Core2 E8400 (single-thread, not vectorized),
higher numbers are better:

SciMark          composite  |
small                score  |  FFT     SOR      MC    SPARSE    LU
----------------------------+---------------------------------------
GCC 4.3.2            906.1  |  739.1   909.0   190.4  1057.0  1635.1
JVM 1.6 Server       876.3  |  573.8  1185.5   297.7   579.2  1745.4
JVM 1.6 Client       579.6  |  424.8   895.8   122.8   595.5   859.0
----------------------------+---------------------------------------
LuaJIT 2.0.0-beta1   580.4  |  427.4  1025.0   223.7   303.4   922.5
LuaJIT 1.1.5          96.7  |   72.0   166.1    37.1    91.8   116.5
Lua 5.1.4             16.5  |   11.0    27.4     7.6    16.9    19.5

Get the newest Lua SciMark here: http://luajit.org/download/scimark.lua