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  15 <a href="http://luajit.org"><span>Lua<span id="logo">JIT</span></span></a>
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  18 <h1>LuaJIT</h1>
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  58 <p>
  59 LuaJIT is a <b>Just-In-Time Compiler</b> for the Lua<sup>*</sup>
  60 programming language.
  61 </p>
  62 <p>
  63 LuaJIT is Copyright &copy; 2005-2011 Mike Pall.
  64 LuaJIT is open source software, released under the
  65 <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;MIT license</a>.
  66 </p>
  67 <p class="indent" style="color: #606060;">
  68 * Lua is a powerful, dynamic and light-weight programming language
  69 designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a
  70 general-purpose, stand-alone language. More information about
  71 Lua can be found at: <a href="http://www.lua.org/"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;http://www.lua.org/</a>
  72 </p>
  73 <h2>Compatibility</h2>
  74 <p>
  75 LuaJIT implements the full set of language features defined by Lua 5.1.
  76 The virtual machine (VM) is <b>API- and ABI-compatible</b> to the
  77 standard Lua interpreter and can be deployed as a drop-in replacement.
  78 </p>
  79 <p>
  80 LuaJIT offers more performance, at the expense of portability. It
  81 currently runs on all popular operating systems based on
  82 <b>x86</b> or <b>x64</b> CPUs (Linux, Windows, OSX etc.) or embedded
  83 systems based on <b>ARM</b> (Android, iOS) or <b>PPC</b> CPUs.
  84 Other platforms will be supported in the future, based on user demand
  85 and sponsoring.
  86 </p>
  87
  88 <h2>Overview</h2>
  89 <p>
  90 LuaJIT has been successfully used as a <b>scripting middleware</b> in
  91 games, 3D modellers, numerical simulations, trading platforms and many
  92 other specialty applications. It combines high flexibility with high
  93 performance and an unmatched <b>low memory footprint</b>: less than
  94 <b>125K</b> for the VM plus less than <b>85K</b> for the JIT compiler (on x86).
  95 </p>
  96 <p>
  97 LuaJIT has been in continuous development since 2005. It's widely
  98 considered to be <b>one of the fastest dynamic language
  99 implementations</b>. It has outperformed other dynamic languages on many
 100 cross-language benchmarks since its first release &mdash; often by a
 101 substantial margin. In 2009 other dynamic language VMs started to catch up
 102 with the performance of LuaJIT 1.x. Well, I couldn't let that slide. ;-)
 103 </p>
 104 <p>
 105 2009 also marks the first release of the long-awaited <b>LuaJIT 2.0</b>.
 106 The whole VM has been rewritten from the ground up and relentlessly
 107 optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed interpreter,
 108 written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.
 109 </p>
 110 <p>
 111 An innovative <b>trace compiler</b> is integrated with advanced,
 112 SSA-based optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This
 113 allows a substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic
 114 language features.
 115 </p>
 116 <p>
 117 It's destined to break into the <a href="http://luajit.org/performance.html"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;performance</a>
 118 range traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.
 119 </p>
 120
 121 <h2>More ...</h2>
 122 <p>
 123 Click on the LuaJIT sub-topics in the navigation bar to learn more
 124 about LuaJIT.
 125 </p>
 126 <p><p>
 127 Click on the Logo in the upper left corner to visit
 128 the LuaJIT project page on the web. All other links to online
 129 resources are marked with a '<span class="ext">&raquo;</span>'.
 130 </p>
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 135 Copyright &copy; 2005-2011 Mike Pall
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