Is it really faster than Javascript though?

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

This is for the lua interpreter. aka the PUC-Lua You should compare it to Luajit, wich is a proper JIT compiler as V8..

The benchmark game used to have Luajit, but they take it out for no reason..

You can download the scripts and run in you local machine against V8, using Luajit for real comparison..

http://luajit.org/

Also this link compare a lot of language implementations in different benchmarks than the ones in shootout

http://attractivechaos.github.io/plb/

edit: also see this blog post about benchmarks; if i am not mistaken, this guy is behind V8 and Dart VM's implementations

http://mrale.ph/blog/2011/05/12/dangers-of-cross-language-be...