In one of the comments to another question, it was suggested that Luajit would be an ideal - or at least interesting - choice for bioinformatics, combining high performance with concise expression and flexibility. Since esoteric languages are fun, I'm curious whether Lua has seen any/much use in bioinformatics. Lua itself doesn't do too well in the shootout, a median score of more than 30x the time used by C. Why are there no Luajit numbers? And there are no multi-CPU results, how well does Lua and Luajit support multithreaded applications?
The lua-jit numbers were removed recently from the CLBG. I am not sure why.
If you want to see luajit number check this site.
As for your question about threads. You do not have threads at lua level. Lua offers
coroutines. They do not run concurrently as threads.
IMMO, Luajit is truly mind-blowing. If you look at this benchmarks you will see the
performance is very close to C despite we are talking about a scripting language. And I
agree with you, lua is very expressive. The only "issue" is perhaps the relatively limited API compared to other programming languages.
BTW, it is understandable that the Lua numbers are higher than the LuaJIT ones. LJ uses
a just in time compiler heavily optimized for the targeted platform (x86, ARM and PPC).
The lua interpreter translates the source into its internal format. C code interprets it and
executes each instruction.
Who's going to start BioLua? The closest I know of is: https://github.com/lh3/misc/blob/master/klib.lua