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satvikpendemyesterday at 5:41 PM5 repliesview on HN

Lua, especially with LuaJIT, is nearly as fast as C. I certainly don't want to have to run a slow language like Ruby or especially a full blown JS runtime like V8 just to run Vim, the entire point is speed and keyboard ergonomics, otherwise just use VSCode.


Replies

augusto-mouratoday at 3:21 AM

You don't need V8 for running JS for scripting, you have quickjs[1] or mquickjs[2] for example. You might have problems importing npm packages, but as we can see from lua plugins you don't even need support for package managers. Performance is not as good as luajit, but it is good enough

[1]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/

[2]: https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs

comexyesterday at 8:48 PM

V8 is faster than LuaJIT. But sure, it has a large binary size.

freedombenyesterday at 5:59 PM

Quite a fair point! For intensive plugins and such, this would matter quite a bit.

user3939382yesterday at 5:55 PM

Babashka! Super fast clojure/lisp.

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lloekiyesterday at 7:44 PM

Isn't LuaJIT kind of a dead end?

Also Ruby has been getting quite fast since YJIT (and now ZJIT):

https://railsatscale.com/2023-08-29-ruby-outperforms-c/