LuaJIT
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
3recommend
4warn against
Nov 24, 2025first mention
Aug 17, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“It's still a great backend, even for a statically typed language, and the FFI and debugger features are very useful.”
builds language compilerson “The Green Side of the Lua”
“I could increase performance by using LuaJIT”
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“and LuaJIT, which has plugins that improve the performance of strings and tables”
Caveats and dissent
“LuaJIT in particular still has build problems on WoA”
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Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Lua 5.5 4 mentions
- Why Janet? 2 mentions
- The Green Side of the Lua 2 mentions
- Vim 9.2 Released 2 mentions
- Xorshift Generators 1 mention
- Lde 0.10.0 – LuaJIT written, all in one, package manager and runtime 1 mention
Data: luajit.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 24
“I use LuaJIT.”
“written entirely from scratch in LuaJIT using FFI”
“but not under LuaJIT”
“Looks like LuaJIT is catching up, but calling these "syntax extensions" is confusing.”
“Luajit and SBCL are very much performance competitive with the JVM?”
“I gather that some features will be added to 2.1 but others only to 3.0”
“about 30% slower than Fennel on LuaJit”
“LuaJIT in particular still has build problems on WoA”
“V8 was significantly faster than LuaJIT”
“It's still a great backend, even for a statically typed language, and the FFI and debugger features are very useful.”
“LuaJIT is frozen at Lua 5.1 with some extensions for 5,2”
“I could increase performance by using LuaJIT”
“and LuaJIT, which has plugins that improve the performance of strings and tables”
“Isn't LuaJIT kind of a dead end?”
“nowhere close to luajit in terms of speed”
“The main LuaJIT author (Mike Pall) is working on unrelated projects”
“LuaJIT has always had pluggable allocator system”
On the other end of the optimizer size spectrum, a surprising place to find a DSL is LuaJIT’s “FOLD” stage: https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/blob/v2.1/src/lj_opt_fold.c (it’s just pattern matching, more or less, that the DSL compiler distills down to a perfect hash).
“Still waiting[0][1] for proper RISC-V support.”
“Not true, see "Extensions from Lua 5.2" here”
No, real LuaJIT has some features from 5.2 and 5.3 https://luajit.org/extensions.html
“which is why LuaJIT is so popular. But LuaJIT is really just one guy’s project.”
“LuaJIT FFI actually has a similar feature.”
“Luajit is already popular and has plenty of benchmarks online.”