As far as benchmarking is concerned, neko feels on par with Python, which is to say not very fast compared to VM based language like Java or even Lua. Lua is certainly the fastest interpreted language there is.
I studied a bit more the Lua internals and setup a comparison document there :
http://nekovm.org/lua I'll maybe post it for review on the Lua list once I'm back from holidays. Nicolas -- Neko : One VM to run them all (http://nekovm.org)
