Post #1307298

2026-04-15 11:51 UTC

C interpreters underlie many of our most widely used language implementations -- but they&#39;re slow. Wouldn&#39;t it be great if we could turn them into JIT compiling VMs? This video shows what happens when we do just that to the normal Lua VM (first) and &quot;yklua&quot; (Lua w/JIT, second).

Replies (3)

@ltratt@mastodon.social 2026-04-15 11:51

This isn't just a technique for Lua, though -- it works for any C interpreter compilable with LLVM! More about how and why in this new post 'Retrofitting JIT Compilers into C Interpreters' looking at our new 'yk' system. https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2026/retrofitting_jit_compilers_into_c_interpreters.html

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@ltratt@mastodon.social 2026-04-15 11:54

I want to say a big thanks to Shopify and the Royal Academy of Engineering who graciously funded this research. I'd like to dedicate this work to the late Chris Seaton, who was an early champion of yk: he is much missed by me and many others.

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@antopatriarca@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-15 13:28

@ltratt@mastodon.social Interesting article. But what actually surprised me the most is the performance difference, even before your JIT, between Lua and micropython. It is huge!

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