Lua vs Ruby benchmarks (similarly "high-level" languages, insanely different performance)

LuaJIT is not the standard mainline Lua interpreter that most people think of as "Lua the language". It's still a fairly young, experimental project and you wouldn't want to write production code in it. However, the standard Lua distribution is still much faster than Ruby.<p>But even though both are dynamic interpreted languages, it's still apples to oranges - they have very different design goals.<p>Still, I think it's a copout to say performance doesn't matter in any general-purpose language the way the core Ruby team seems to. Micro-optimization is a waste of time, but efficiency and intelligent implementation choices are necessary.

Without some discussion of why Lua is faster, this isn't very interesting. Lua is known for being small and fast, so this benchmark shouldn't be news to most people here.<p>SBCL is faster still, averaging about half the speed of GCC and about the same as Java.

I don't know Lua, but this is the first time I've heard Lua and Ruby equated in terms of expressibility/flexibility (i.e. "high-level"?). Is that a particularly relevant comparison?

Personally, I would hav just done Lua vs Ruby instead of LuaJIT vs Ruby.<p>Results look almost the same ;-)<p><a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&#38;lang=lua&#38;lang2=ruby" rel="nofollow">http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...</a><p>Lua is generally the fastest scripty language, ruby is generally the slowest. Ruby is much more general purpose though -- Lua is very optimized for embedding.

mod_lua will be in the next stable apache release. <a href="http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-12/msg00119.html" rel="nofollow">http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-12/msg00119.html</a>

Who would care to implement Ruby in Lua?

Which version of Ruby? 1.8 or 1.9? With my own projects Ruby 1.9 performs much better. Lua is well known for being small and fast, so I doubt Ruby 1.9 would beat it... Nevertheless, it'd be a lot more interesting comparison that Lua vs Ruby ???.

Looks like perf comparison between both Python and Python 3 against Lua isn't far off from Ruby and Lua... not really surprised. Like everyone else said, Lua is smaller and leaner.

This year my new year's resolution was to learn Lua. I think with some developer attention it has the potential to become a "better PHP" for web development because it beats PHP in performance, simplicty and elegance.<p>Although I doubt it's going to ever replace PHP I think it's poised to make some inroads now that the next version of Apache will include mod_lua out of the box.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452396" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452396</a>

Of course; Get a native JIT'ed version of ruby going, then you can make a fair comparison.

Are both sets of code optimized?

I wonder how it would compare with Ruby 1.9 (released today)?

LuaJIT is x86 only, so it's not quite apples to apples.