Re: Does Lua need a JIT?

On 1 March 2017 at 11:10, Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk> wrote:

It would be interesting to know why you chose LuaJIT for this
application. What were the driving factors for choosing a dynamically
typed scripting language? Today, with the availability of a language
like Rust, would you still make the same choice?

I prefer dynamic languages to static ones. LuaJIT provided a reasonable compromise between performance, expressiveness, and easy learning curve.

Lua's gentle learning curve is especially valuable in making the code accessible to people who are not professional programmers. This way amateur programmers can contribute to the project directly e.g. the network engineers who build and maintain ISPs and feel a do-it-yourself impulse. If we had assumed that contributors would be professional system programmers then we would end up working with an entirely different group of people i.e. staff of network equipment vendors (and they are already happy with C/C++ anyway.)

I did evaluate Rust for about one hour. It hadn't finished compiling yet when I gave up :).

Here is what I blogged at the time:

http://lukego.github.io/blog/2012/09/25/lukes-highly-opinionated-programming-language-roundup-2012/

(If I were revising that now I would say LuaJIT's implementation is "small" but not "simple" :-))

Cheers,

-Luke