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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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  60 <p>
  61 LuaJIT is a <b>Just-In-Time Compiler</b> for the Lua<sup>*</sup>
  62 programming language.
  63 </p>
  64 <p>
  65 LuaJIT is Copyright &copy; 2005-2011 Mike Pall.
  66 LuaJIT is open source software, released under the
  67 <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;MIT/X license</a>.
  68 </p>
  69 <p class="indent" style="color: #606060;">
  70 * Lua is a powerful, dynamic and light-weight programming language
  71 designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a
  72 general-purpose, stand-alone language. More information about
  73 Lua can be found at: <a href="http://www.lua.org/"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;http://www.lua.org/</a>
  74 </p>
  75 <h2>Compatibility</h2>
  76 <p>
  77 LuaJIT implements the full set of language features defined by Lua 5.1.
  78 The virtual machine (VM) is <b>API- and ABI-compatible</b> to the
  79 standard Lua interpreter and can be deployed as a drop-in replacement.
  80 </p>
  81 <p>
  82 LuaJIT offers more performance, at the expense of portability. It
  83 currently runs on all popular operating systems based on
  84 <b>x86</b> or <b>x64 CPUs</b> (Linux, Windows, OSX etc.) or embedded Linux
  85 systems based on <b>PPC/e500v2 CPUs</b>.
  86 Other platforms will be supported in the future, based on user demand
  87 and sponsoring.
  88 </p>
  89
  90 <h2>Overview</h2>
  91 <p>
  92 LuaJIT has been successfully used as a <b>scripting middleware</b> in
  93 games, 3D modellers, numerical simulations, trading platforms and many
  94 other specialty applications. It combines high flexibility with high
  95 performance and an unmatched <b>low memory footprint</b>: less than
  96 <b>120K</b> for the VM plus less than <b>80K</b> for the JIT compiler (on x86).
  97 </p>
  98 <p>
  99 LuaJIT has been in continuous development since 2005. It's widely
 100 considered to be <b>one of the fastest dynamic language
 101 implementations</b>. It has outperfomed other dynamic languages on many
 102 cross-language benchmarks since its first release &mdash; often by a
 103 substantial margin. In 2009 other dynamic language VMs started to catch up
 104 with the performance of LuaJIT 1.x. Well, I couldn't let that slide. ;-)
 105 </p>
 106 <p>
 107 2009 also marks the first release of the long-awaited <b>LuaJIT 2.0</b>.
 108 The whole VM has been rewritten from the ground up and relentlessly
 109 optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed interpreter,
 110 written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.
 111 </p>
 112 <p>
 113 An innovative <b>trace compiler</b> is integrated with advanced,
 114 SSA-based optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This
 115 allows a substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic
 116 language features.
 117 </p>
 118 <p>
 119 It's destined to break into the <a href="http://luajit.org/performance.html"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;performance</a>
 120 range traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.
 121 Have look at these <a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&d=data&calc=calculate&gpp=on&java=on&luajit=on&v8=on&lua=on&tracemonkey=on&box=1"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;cross-language benchmarks</a>
 122 to see how it ranks against the competition.
 123 </p>
 124
 125 <h2>More ...</h2>
 126 <p>
 127 Click on the LuaJIT sub-topics in the navigation bar to learn more
 128 about LuaJIT.
 129 </p>
 130 <p><p>
 131 Click on the Logo in the upper left corner to visit
 132 the LuaJIT project page on the web. All other links to online
 133 resources are marked with a '<span class="ext">&raquo;</span>'.
 134 </p>
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