The Green Side of the Lua
by radiator on 5/24/2026, 11:44:58 PM
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16670
Comments
by: PaulRobinson
Energy efficiency as a "my language is better than yours" point was not on my bingo card for 2026.<p>JIT as an energy saver intuitively makes sense, and is probably the model most languages need to think about for "shipping to prod". I'm aware Python has started developing this, and given the install base, it's encouraging that results like this show it could have significant benefits for users.
5/28/2026, 5:56:56 AM
by: Rochus
Interesting results. Particularly they barely found a speed-up of newer compared to older LuaJIT versions (rather the contrary). Maybe they should have used the Are-we-fast-yet suite instead of the (random looking) set of microbenchmarks. I did measurements of Lua and LuaJIT some time ago based on Are-we-fast-yet and saw significant differences in LuaJIT performance (see <a href="http://software.rochus-keller.ch/are-we-fast-yet_LuaJIT_2017_vs_2023_results.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://software.rochus-keller.ch/are-we-fast-yet_LuaJIT_2017...</a>).<p>I also compared different PUC Lua versions in an earlier measurement (see <a href="http://software.rochus-keller.ch/are-we-fast-yet_lua_results_2020-10-12.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://software.rochus-keller.ch/are-we-fast-yet_lua_results...</a>) and found similar significant differences between versions.
5/25/2026, 2:05:32 PM
by: aa-jv
As someone who has shipped Lua as a solution to many an embedded dilemma, this is highly interesting work.<p>I wonder if there will be motivation in the future to address energy consumption in future JIT work .. in fact I wonder whether other languages are going to face a similar optimization path. It would be grand to see progress being made on this at a more general scale. I'm looking at you, Python ..
5/28/2026, 4:58:35 AM