2017-06-03 22:11 GMT+02:00 Patrick Gundlach <[email protected]>: >> a sample lua script runs twice slower with texlua of TL2017 >> than with the texlua from TL2016 and bare lua 5.3.3 I also >> have on my mac os x 10.9.5 > > > I am not sure if this is still relevant (I haven't followed the whole > discussion). Anyway: on my system (latest Mac Laptop with up to date > software) I have the same results with tl2017 and tl2016 (minor differences > of course): > > > $ time texlua collatz.lua > > real 0m14.837s > user 0m14.552s > sys 0m0.106s > > $ time texluajit collatz.lua > > real 0m10.231s > user 0m10.205s > sys 0m0.012s
I don't think it is a fair or even relevant test of texlua to use it on a CPU-intensive job involving no string processing whatsover, especially one that is easy and natural to do directly in C. texlua is not the reason why luatex exists, it is just a convenient add-on so that you do not need an independent Lua installation for the auxiliary scripts you may need to produce a beautiful document using TeX. In fact, texlua is not a separate program at all, it is luatex with certain options deduced from the name by which it is called. luatex called on a file with extension .lua does exactly the same job. Its main attraction over native Lua is that so many batteries are included — zip, gzip, mime, socket, unicode etc. Its main disadvantage is that it does not provide a Lua REPL. You must save your Lua code in a file. That must have been a design decision years ago. I wonder what the reasons were, and whether they are still as cogent now as then.
