doc/luajit.html

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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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  22 <a class="current" href="luajit.html">LuaJIT</a>
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  42 <p>
  43 LuaJIT is a <b>Just-In-Time Compiler</b> for the Lua<sup>*</sup>
  44 programming language.
  45 </p>
  46 <p>
  47 LuaJIT is Copyright &copy; 2005-2010 Mike Pall.
  48 LuaJIT is open source software, released under the
  49 <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;MIT/X license</a>.
  50 </p>
  51 <p class="indent" style="color: #606060;">
  52 * Lua is a powerful, dynamic and light-weight programming language
  53 designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a
  54 general-purpose, stand-alone language. More information about
  55 Lua can be found at: <a href="http://www.lua.org/"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;http://www.lua.org/</a>
  56 </p>
  57 <h2>Compatibility</h2>
  58 <p>
  59 LuaJIT implements the full set of language features defined by Lua 5.1.
  60 The virtual machine (VM) is <b>API- and ABI-compatible</b> to the
  61 standard Lua interpreter and can be deployed as a drop-in replacement.
  62 </p>
  63 <p>
  64 LuaJIT offers more performance, at the expense of portability. It
  65 currently runs on all popular operating systems based on <b>x86 CPUs</b>
  66 (Linux, Windows, OSX etc.). A port to x64 CPUs is currently ongoing &mdash;
  67 you can follow its progress in the <a href="http://luajit.org/download.html"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;git repository</a>.
  68 Other platforms will be supported in the future, based on user demand
  69 and sponsoring.
  70 </p>
  71
  72 <h2>Overview</h2>
  73 <p>
  74 LuaJIT has been successfully used as a <b>scripting middleware</b> in
  75 games, 3D modellers, numerical simulations, trading platforms and many
  76 other specialty applications. It combines high flexibility with high
  77 performance and an unmatched <b>low memory footprint</b>: less than
  78 <b>120K</b> for the VM plus less than <b>80K</b> for the JIT compiler.
  79 </p>
  80 <p>
  81 LuaJIT has been in continuous development since 2005. It's widely
  82 considered to be <b>one of the fastest dynamic language
  83 implementations</b>. It has outperfomed other dynamic languages on many
  84 cross-language benchmarks since its first release &mdash; often by a
  85 substantial margin. In 2009 other dynamic language VMs started to catch up
  86 with the performance of LuaJIT 1.x. Well, I couldn't let that slide. ;-)
  87 </p>
  88 <p>
  89 2009 also marks the first release of the long-awaited <b>LuaJIT 2.0</b>.
  90 The whole VM has been rewritten from the ground up and relentlessly
  91 optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed interpreter,
  92 written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.
  93 </p>
  94 <p>
  95 An innovative <b>trace compiler</b> is integrated with advanced,
  96 SSA-based optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This
  97 allows a substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic
  98 language features. It's destined to break into the performance range
  99 traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.
 100 </p>
 101
 102 <h2>More ...</h2>
 103 <p>
 104 Click on the LuaJIT sub-topics in the navigation bar to learn more
 105 about LuaJIT.
 106 </p>
 107 <p><p>
 108 Click on the Logo in the upper left corner to visit
 109 the LuaJIT project page on the web. All other links to online
 110 resources are marked with a '<span class="ext">&raquo;</span>'.
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