It’s a Just-In-Time compiler for Lua. It is supported on all major platforms including: Windows, Linux and macOS. It’s been used as a scripting language in games, graphical apps, trading systems as well as in embedded devices like smartphones.
LuaJIT is high-performance with a very low memory footprint version. On macOS it can be installed from sources downloaded from here.
There are numerous extensions available: to operate on bits, ffi – to call external C/C++ functions as well as additional to a standard Lua library. It has enhanced GC in comparison to Lua as well as more options to work with memory objects.
There’s also a bytecode to get familiar with.
| print "Hello world" | |
| -- BYTECODE -- stdin:0-2 | |
| 0001 GGET 0 0 ; "print" | |
| 0002 KSTR 1 1 ; "Hello world" | |
| 0003 CALL 0 1 2 | |
| 0004 RET0 0 1 |
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Founder of Octal Solutions a .NET software house.
Passionate dev, blogger, occasionally speaker, one of the leaders of Wroc.NET user group. Microsoft MVP. Podcaster – Ostrapila.pl