Efficient compilation of Lua for the CLR

Authors:
Fabio Mascarenhas;Roberto Ierusalimschy
Affiliations:
PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Microsoft's Common Language Runtime offers a target environment for compiler writers that provides a managed execution environment and type system, garbage collection, access to OS services, multithreading, and a Just-In-Time compiler. But the CLR uses a statically typed intermediate language, which is a problem for efficient compilation of dynamically typed languages in general, and the Lua language in particular. This paper presents a way to implement a Lua compiler for the CLR that generates efficient code. The code this compiler generates outperforms the same code executed by the Lua interpreter and similar code generated by Microsoft's IronPython compiler. It approaches the performance of Lua code compiled to native code by LuaJIT.