A Walk with LuaJIT

112 pointsposted 3 days ago
by damir

17 Comments

gnurizen

14 hours ago

I wrote the code and the blog, happy to answer any questions/comments. Very eager to have folks try it out and give feedback! Like is my meme game strong or very strong? J/K

There's some missing bits around FFI and callbacks (i.e. C calling function pointer that is a luajit generated stub back into the interpreter) and curious if anyone actually uses these things in OpenResty workloads. Deploy and enjoy!

brancz

16 hours ago

Thanks for submitting! We know HN has a sweet spot for LuaJIT, so we figured it would eventually end up here.

Quick summary: this post dives into the gory details of how we implemented an eBPF based profiler for LuaJIT.

Let us know if you have any questions on this, we’ll keep an eye out on comments!

neomantra

15 hours ago

Very deep dive, thank you for sharing it all. So cool it traverses callbacks too.

brancz

15 hours ago

Glad you liked it! Yeah, we worked with a customer who really needs this badly and has done some unspeakable things to get by until now.

alberth

16 hours ago

I’m tremendous excited about LuaJIT 3.0 development.

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/1092

Q: does anyone know timeline on the release?

rurban

15 hours ago

Looks like 10 years to me

slekker

14 hours ago

Why do you think that?

dkersten

14 hours ago

None of the items listed there have been ticked off in the time since the ticket was opened, not even the “create v3 branch” one. Mike also has had plans for v3 for at least the last decade too.

So, I’m sure it’ll get worked on when he can, and it’ll be great when it’s done, but it doesn’t look like there’s active development on it and it doesn’t look like it will happen any time soon. I hope in wrong, of course, but it just doesn’t seem likely.

versteegen

12 hours ago

Actually there is some progress.

For example there is a new higher-performance GC (https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/38#issuecomment-1696...) since a year ago (in fact, at least 3 people over the years have taken a stab at writing a new GC!)

And a full port to (certain flavours of) RISC-V was finished a couple months ago and awaiting merge (https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/pull/1267), and might be merged separately into the OpenResty fork (https://github.com/openresty/luajit2/pull/236).

binary132

8 hours ago

From what I understood Mike does not want to merge someone else’s implementation of a new ISA but would rather be sponsored and do it himself. Can’t be bothered to source this claim at the moment so feel free to treat it as “came to me in a dream” level authenticity until proven otherwise. Seems reasonable though, I would also be paranoid about merging a sensitive complicated JIT implementation from an unknown contributor.

versteegen

4 hours ago

He wrote something along those lines here [1], which was in reply to a completely different, prototype-quality RISC-V port attempt

> Is the sponsor prepared to sponsor the initial review and integration into the LuaJIT default code base by me?

> Is the sponsor prepared to sponsor the inevitable initial bug fixes and the extra effort for continued maintenance that a new architecture entails?

Also, I should have been clearer about the new GC I linked to: I have not seen Mike say anything about it, and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if he rejects it and (wishes to) write his own, because he's had his own plans for many years. It seems impossible to get anything past him without modification. (I think it's a pity to see someone send a PR with a highly informative commit message and he replaces the body with "Thanks to X. #987")

[1] https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/628#issuecomment-716...

mordnis

4 hours ago

I was a part of the team that contributed a few of the ports actually. For example, you can take a look at vm_mips64.dasc file header for the contributor list.

Though, it is possible that he changed his mind after having to review thousands of lines of assembly written by 25 year olds. :)

versteegen

4 hours ago

Kudos! Was it difficult to get it accepted? I've seen ports rejected.

benwilber0

13 hours ago

LuaJIT.org stopped publishing release tarballs [1] which caused leafo's GH actions builds [2] to suddenly stop working. The workaround was to start testing against OpenResty's distribution of LuaJIT [3] which is incompatible with LuaJIT.org's version.

There is no faster way to make a fork the de facto standard version than to break everyone's CI builds.

[1] https://luajit.org/download.html

[2] https://github.com/leafo/gh-actions-lua/issues/49

[3] https://github.com/openresty/luajit2

krapp

13 hours ago

The workaround for LuaJIT moving to Github was to... clone a fork of it?

If they could do that, why can't they just pull from the LuaJIT repo?

tecleandor

12 hours ago

LuaJIT didn't move to GitHub, they just have a mirror there.

The thing is they stopped numbering and publishing releases, it's all a rolling release without any name or number, so you cannot snapshot I'm certain version.

But OpenResty fork does create tag versions with date, so they can build or test against certain concrete snapshot frozen in time.