[ANN] LuaJIT-2.0.0-beta9

[Mike Pall <mikelu-1112@...>]

This is the 9th beta release of LuaJIT 2.0.0.

This release has many bug fixes and several new features: 
- The port of LuaJIT to PPC CPUs is complete.
- The FFI library now supports callbacks from C code to Lua.
- Support for generating and loading embeddable bytecode.
- Improvements to the JIT compiler region selection heuristics.

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

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

And a link to the changelog:
  http://luajit.org/changes.html

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

LuaJIT is a Just-In-Time (JIT) Compiler for Lua. It's upwards
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 most x86 or x64 operating systems
(Linux, Windows, OSX etc.) and can be cross-compiled for embedded
systems based on ARM (Android, iOS), PPC or PPC/e500 CPUs.

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!

PPC Port
--------

The PPC port of LuaJIT is now complete: it requires a regular PPC CPU
running in 32 bit mode. The port has been tuned for the FreeScale e300
cores, but runs fine on all PPC CPUs with a standard hardware FPU.

I'm sorry to report that the PS3 and XBox 360 ports of LuaJIT haven't
made it into this release. I'm confident the remaining legal issues
can be resolved soon, though.

FFI Callbacks
-------------

Docs are here:
  http://luajit.org/ext_ffi_semantics.html#callback

tl;dr: Just pass a Lua function to a C function taking a callback
argument and the FFI will do all the magic in the background.

I've already posted some FFI callback examples here:
  http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-11/msg00499.html

Sponsorships
------------

iNTERFACEWARE Inc. is sponsoring the continued development of
LuaJIT 2.0 beginning in September 2011. iNTERFACEWARE uses LuaJIT
in their Iguana Translator 5 for processing and converting
healthcare-related data (HL7).

A corporate sponsor, who wishes to remain anonymous, has sponsored
the FFI callback feature.

MIPS Technologies, Inc. has sponsored the port of LuaJIT to the
MIPS32 R1 architecture, tuned for the 34K and 74K cores. Work on
this port is already in progress.

--Mike