I think the benchmark on LuaJIT website shows this a little bit: http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html If you consider

I think the benchmark on LuaJIT website shows this a little bit: http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html If you consider LuaJit 1.x to be a baseline JIT, the interpreter mode of LuaJit 2.0 is actually on par there. EDIT: actually I should say that in x86 mode they are on par, while on x64 mode, the interpreter of LuaJIT 2.0 is always faster