Lua is indeed a pretty nice language for some use-cases and it's nice to see this example. It would also be great to see a comparison to Numba which is a Python JIT particularly suited for fast numerical computing with Python: <a href="http://numba.pydata.org" rel="nofollow">http://numba.pydata.org</a><p>Numba provides speed-ups over NumPy and Python and does so in way very easy for Python programmers to use with decorators on Python functions. Numba can be used to easily build new "ufuncs" which are NumPy's universal functions and it has multiple interfaces for programming the GPU directly from Python for even higher performance.
Lua is amazing. I've used it to reimplement an API served by Python and it was consistently twice as fast i.e. half the time to serve a request compared to the Python framework in basically the same code.
As anyone experience with adding new types to Lua ? I mean, in a fundamental type, not just simulating them with regular Lua features. For example, adding a 128 bit float number ?
I suspect that this is not using stock Lua, but LuaJIT instead. Stock Lua wouldn't be much different than Python itself.<p>The real gains come from Mike Pall's amazing JIT implementation, not the language itself.