<story><title>What&apos;s New in Lua 5.4</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/826134/b1b87e4187435cec/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pansa2</author><text>&amp;gt; I think there&amp;#x27;s a space for a new project, which takes LuaJIT as a starting point&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, LuaJIT is tightly-coupled to the Lua language and its code is very complex. I&amp;#x27;d be surprised if anyone other than Mike Pall was able to retarget it to support a different language.&lt;p&gt;Also, is JIT compilation really necessary for a scripting language? Projects like the PyPy JIT for Python have seen little adoption, and many platforms (e.g. iOS and game consoles) don&amp;#x27;t support JIT at all.</text></item><item><author>gautamcgoel</author><text>Lua is a language I really want to love. I like the emphasis on simplicity and minimalism, and the Scheme-like semantics, which mix imperative and functional styles, really hits a sweet spot IMO. LuaJIT is a crazy impressive feat of software engineering. However, there are some specific issues which hold Lua back IMO. First, as LuaJIT author Mike Pall famously noted, the Lua authors constantly break compatibility between releases. Lua is really several different, incompatible languages (Lua 5.1, 5.2, etc). LuaJIT is still at Lua 5.1, IIRC. Second, there are a bunch of minor nitpicks (1-based-indexing, anyone?) which turn off a bunch of people. Lastly, because Lua is so minimal and focused on portability, people end up reimplementing their own abstractions (such as object systems) from scratch, further fracturing the ecosystem. I think there&amp;#x27;s a space for a new project, which takes LuaJIT as a starting point and addresses some of the issues I described. It would also be great if this hypothetical new language had better support for Unicode and concurrency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>PyPy JIT is unsuccessful because CPython makes it hard for PyPy, not because people don&amp;#x27;t want it. When there&amp;#x27;s a need and support for it, we have extremely good JITs spring into existence–JavaScript has at least three, for example.</text></comment>
<story><title>What&apos;s New in Lua 5.4</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/826134/b1b87e4187435cec/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pansa2</author><text>&amp;gt; I think there&amp;#x27;s a space for a new project, which takes LuaJIT as a starting point&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, LuaJIT is tightly-coupled to the Lua language and its code is very complex. I&amp;#x27;d be surprised if anyone other than Mike Pall was able to retarget it to support a different language.&lt;p&gt;Also, is JIT compilation really necessary for a scripting language? Projects like the PyPy JIT for Python have seen little adoption, and many platforms (e.g. iOS and game consoles) don&amp;#x27;t support JIT at all.</text></item><item><author>gautamcgoel</author><text>Lua is a language I really want to love. I like the emphasis on simplicity and minimalism, and the Scheme-like semantics, which mix imperative and functional styles, really hits a sweet spot IMO. LuaJIT is a crazy impressive feat of software engineering. However, there are some specific issues which hold Lua back IMO. First, as LuaJIT author Mike Pall famously noted, the Lua authors constantly break compatibility between releases. Lua is really several different, incompatible languages (Lua 5.1, 5.2, etc). LuaJIT is still at Lua 5.1, IIRC. Second, there are a bunch of minor nitpicks (1-based-indexing, anyone?) which turn off a bunch of people. Lastly, because Lua is so minimal and focused on portability, people end up reimplementing their own abstractions (such as object systems) from scratch, further fracturing the ecosystem. I think there&amp;#x27;s a space for a new project, which takes LuaJIT as a starting point and addresses some of the issues I described. It would also be great if this hypothetical new language had better support for Unicode and concurrency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jashmatthews</author><text>Compared to other JIT compilers LuaJIT is very simple. Thomas Schilling forked LuaJIT to run Haskell with what looked like some good results &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;files.catwell.info&amp;#x2F;misc&amp;#x2F;mirror&amp;#x2F;tracing-jit-haskell-schilling.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;files.catwell.info&amp;#x2F;misc&amp;#x2F;mirror&amp;#x2F;tracing-jit-haskell-sc...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>