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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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  62 <p>
  63 LuaJIT is a <b>Just-In-Time Compiler</b> for the Lua<sup>*</sup>
  64 programming language.
  65 </p>
  66 <p>
  67 LuaJIT is Copyright &copy; 2005-2012 Mike Pall.
  68 LuaJIT is open source software, released under the
  69 <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;MIT license</a>.
  70 </p>
  71 <p class="indent" style="color: #606060;">
  72 * Lua is a powerful, dynamic and light-weight programming language
  73 designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a
  74 general-purpose, stand-alone language. More information about
  75 Lua can be found at: <a href="http://www.lua.org/"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;http://www.lua.org/</a>
  76 </p>
  77 <h2>Compatibility</h2>
  78 <p>
  79 LuaJIT implements the full set of language features defined by Lua 5.1.
  80 The virtual machine (VM) is <b>API- and ABI-compatible</b> to the
  81 standard Lua interpreter and can be deployed as a drop-in replacement.
  82 </p>
  83 <p>
  84 LuaJIT offers more performance, at the expense of portability. It
  85 currently runs on all popular operating systems based on
  86 <b>x86</b> or <b>x64</b> CPUs (Linux, Windows, OSX etc.) or embedded
  87 systems based on <b>ARM</b> (Android, iOS), <b>PPC</b> or <b>MIPS</b> CPUs.
  88 Other platforms will be supported in the future, based on user demand
  89 and sponsoring.
  90 </p>
  91
  92 <h2>Overview</h2>
  93 <p>
  94 LuaJIT has been successfully used as a <b>scripting middleware</b> in
  95 games, 3D modellers, numerical simulations, trading platforms and many
  96 other specialty applications. It combines high flexibility with high
  97 performance and an unmatched <b>low memory footprint</b>: less than
  98 <b>125K</b> for the VM plus less than <b>85K</b> for the JIT compiler (on x86).
  99 </p>
 100 <p>
 101 LuaJIT has been in continuous development since 2005. It's widely
 102 considered to be <b>one of the fastest dynamic language
 103 implementations</b>. It has outperformed other dynamic languages on many
 104 cross-language benchmarks since its first release &mdash; often by a
 105 substantial margin. In 2009 other dynamic language VMs started to catch up
 106 with the performance of LuaJIT 1.x. Well, I couldn't let that slide. ;-)
 107 </p>
 108 <p>
 109 2009 also marks the first release of the long-awaited <b>LuaJIT 2.0</b>.
 110 The whole VM has been rewritten from the ground up and relentlessly
 111 optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed interpreter,
 112 written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.
 113 </p>
 114 <p>
 115 An innovative <b>trace compiler</b> is integrated with advanced,
 116 SSA-based optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This
 117 allows a substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic
 118 language features.
 119 </p>
 120 <p>
 121 It's destined to break into the <a href="http://luajit.org/performance.html"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;performance</a>
 122 range traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.
 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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 139 Copyright &copy; 2005-2012 Mike Pall
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