Ravi: An Experimental Derivative Of Lua In LLVM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ravi: An Experimental Derivative Of Lua In LLVM

Ravi is a new open-source project that's an experimental dialect/derivative of Lua using LLVM for JIT compilation...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ravi-Lua-JIT-LLVM

[Ardje]

I welcome jit for lua5.3 .
I think lua5.3 is a major breakthrough in platform interfacing, while lua5.2 did a lot for language semantics.
The biggest + in 5.3 is the native 64 bit types.
Anyone that has to do os/system interfacing will understand that. Almost everything these days are 64 bit integers, and the lua number was a 64 bit float (in 32 bit old intel architectures it is probably 80 bits, but the 64 bit architecture just supports IEEE floats). There is a big difference in having a 64 bit inode nr represented in a language native instead of 8 bytes of user data (for which you have to implement all handlers).
Luajit is 5.1 compatible and a lot of software sticks at 5.1, so I hope this will mean skipping 5.2 and good support for 5.3.

[rdnetto]

The interesting issue will be how the performance compares. IIRC, Lua has one of the fastest JITs - it'll be interesting to see if LLVM can match it.