Re: Does Lua need a JIT?

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 6:41 AM, Sergey Rozhenko <sergroj@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Ср 22.02.17 4:12, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
>>
>> Related to my post about why I have not used the JIT technology in
>> Ravi for my project (yet), is the question: do we need a JIT for Lua
>> at all?
>>
>> I have no data points to tell me under what conditions a JIT makes
>> sense, apart from artificial benchmarks. The most obvious use case is
>> games programming I guess where the highest performance is needed, but
>> I am not a games programmer and do not know whether interpreted Lua is
>> good enough in this case.
>>
>> In my opinion, having worked on Ravi and in my usage of it, Lua is not
>> a general purpose language that you would use to build a large scale
>> application. This is not because of any deficiency in Lua, it is more
>> that large scale development is better done in statically typed
>> languages like Java, C#, Go, Swift etc. The cost of developing complex
>> applications in a dynamic language is just too high. I know that many
>> folks on this list will probably disagree with this view, but leaving
>> aside your love for Lua and your wish to use Lua everywhere, would you
>> still use Lua as a general purpose application development platform?
>
>
> Yes, I'm planning to write games in Lua and no, I don't agree dynamic typing
> is a big deal like that. I've made a serious level editor for Might and
> Magic 6-8 games (hackerish stuff :) ) in Lua and I can say everything came
> together much smoother than in any of my projects in Delphi. LuaJIT was very
> important for it. So, depending on the kind of moddability a game needs I
> would choose from Lua and C#, but I would certainly never want to write any
> game logic in C/C++.
>
> I've made a script to statically catch unwanted global variables access,
> still haven't posted it to the list BTW. Lack of static typing is
> regrettable, but in practice it wasn't a problem because of this script.
> Misnamed fields are still a possibility, maybe I had 1 or 2.
>
> In my father's experience, lack of static typing isn't a big problem in a
> real complex web application developed by a small team over the course of a
> few years in JavaScript.
>
> And don't forget about compilation times, which can be a real pain in big
> applications sometimes.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Sergey "GrayFace" Rozhenko,                 mailto:sergroj@mail.ru

I'm a pretty die-hard C++ weenie, and I'll say that it's not as bad as
it seems on the surface. Kinda boilerplate-y, yes, but I've never
found myself lamenting that I would have an easier time of it in some
other language.

/s/ Adam