OpenResty ships with LuaJIT 2.0 beta. You have to add a ./configure parameter to get it to use it, but it works well, yes. As to bytecode...I think it probably

OpenResty ships with LuaJIT 2.0 beta. You have to add a ./configure parameter to get it to use it, but it works well, yes. As to bytecode...I think it probably does end up more compact than compiled C++, and it seems like it would have properties that would allow it to compress more tightly, but I don't have any numbers on that. I tend to strip the source and compress and encrypt it; I could convert it to bytecode first, but the last time I tried that it ended up bigger than the compressed text. >Android C++/NDK by itself counts as a niche? That's kind of surprising! I would have thought a profitable niche would have to be a bit more specialized by now... I guess the NDK hasn't been out all that long. A lot of "Android" developers are actually Java developers who are trying to cash in on mobile. Serious game developers almost all use the NDK, but serious game developers are in high demand (myself included). So yes, NDK is itself a niche, in that the number of jobs seems to exceed the number of developers available. On the other hand, by being able to do games in NDK I'm even better off, but just being good at NDK development is pretty powerful. Keep in mind that you also have to deal with Java and the Android stack -- you can't do everything in the NDK. So you need to be someone good at C++ who also can get around in Java.