LuaJIT1 compiler was also pretty basic in the way it worked - it did not do any major speculative optimizations afaik, so comparing LJ2 interpreter against it i

LuaJIT1 compiler was also pretty basic in the way it worked - it did not do any major speculative optimizations afaik, so comparing LJ2 interpreter against it is not of much interest. Now check out performance graphs of LuaJIT2 compiler+interpreter vs interpreter modes[1]. Anything remotely computationally expensive is 2x faster with compiler and you can go up to 28x for integer number crunching. I do believe that original point "a good interpreter can get a large portion of the gains you'd get from a compiler" can't be correct simply because it is too broad and ill-defined. What are the gains you expect from the compiler? How can "large portion" be defined? All of these really depend on many things: from the language itself to concrete design decisions in compiler/interpreter. [1] http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html