Lua 5.4.0-alpha-rc2 performance

[Phil Leblanc <philanc@...>]

I looked at the relative performance of Lua 5.3.5 and Lua
5.4.0-alpha-rc2 on a simple test: compute a blake2b hash of a 100 MB
string in pure Lua [1].

This is a very specific workload (_lots_ of integer/bit operations).
So it is not an overall performance evaluation, just an observation.

With Lua optimized for performance (-O3)

   lua-5.3.5        34.3 s
   lua-5.4.0-alpha-rc2    26.9 s    => 1.28 X faster

Even better with Lua optimized for size (-Os)

   lua-5.3.5        41.2 s
   lua-5.4.0-alpha-rc2    29.2 s    => 1.41 X faster

This is quite a nice speedup!

Phil

(the test is run on an average x86_64 laptop - intel i5 @ 1.60GHz)

[1] see plc/blake2b.lua in https://github.com/philanc/plc/