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i use luau a lot as part as my Roblox development work, it's pretty fast for its main use case.

there are people a lot more knowledgeable about this topic so i won't pretend to know this is possible, but could a versioning flag similar to the !native flag be added? it would allow both for backwards compatibility and better optimizations, although i know it might add complexity where it's not needed

It is obviously a choice why isn't done, but with static modules you can know whether * is overloaded. That will improve procuedure calls by a lot, almist always. sure, with polymorphic finctions you can get a bit of the way using inline caches, but in my experience knowing the callee is always going to be a speedup.
Here are some measurement results based on the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Are-we-fast-yet/blob/main/L...

Luau in interpreter mode is pretty much as fast as LuaJIT 2.1 in interpreter mode.

Luau with (partial) native compilation is factor 1.6 slower than LuaJIT 2.1 in JIT mode. I used Luau with the -g0 -O2 --codegen options (didn't add --!native to the code though), which according to my understanding automatically selects the "profitable" functions for native compilation.

I’ve always been curious how Roblox games are deployed and managed. Is each instance of a game executed in a docker container, and the luau code isolated that way or is there some multi-tenant solution?
i'm impressed how much the runtime is optimized across so many layers - pretty rare to see an interpreted language push this far without a JIT. Do you see this approach eventually rivaling JIT performance for real world workloads, esp where predictability matters?