Lua JIT 2.0b

[Justin Johansson]

bearophile Wrote:

> Lua is a dynamically-typed language, so its insights are not directly applicable to D, but recently the version 2.0beta of its Just-in-time compiler has become available:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9zrnp/luajit_2_beta_released/
> 
> Today this JIT is probably the most advanced for dynamic languages. Even V8, that's a very efficient JIT for JavaScript (and that's 2-5 times faster than the new JIT of Firefox), partially developed by expert people coming from the optimization of Smalltalk VM, produces very slow programs compared to this last Lua JIT:
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=luajit&lang2=v8&box=1
> 
> Its SpecMark2 performance may even be compard to DMD ones :o) (I have translated specmark2 to D, if you want it):
> http://pastebin.ca/1650985
> My timings of SpecMark2, for comparison:
> Timings on WinXp 32 bit, 2.00 seconds min time:
>                small   large
>   D DMD:         299    207
>   D DMD:         401    268 (OOP version)
>   C GCC:         578    314
>   C LLVM-GCC:    609    351
> 
> But the meat of this post can be found here:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908
> 
> It's the first time I see tagged floating point doubles, as far as I know not even good CommonLisp implementations are smart enough to use them!
> The ideas behing Lua associative arrays can be used to speed up the common enough case of small AAs in D language. That JIT is created by a single programmer, and I think he's really intelligent and good. He's a top programmer, among the best ten I know :-)
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

Wow!  Confirms that cleverness/intelligence runs on a logarithmic scale.
Can we hire this guy for D?
Thanks for posting this bearophile.

ciao
justin