Philosophy: Who is RaptorJIT for?

[lukego]

Related to the question of what RaptorJIT is #235: Who is RaptorJIT for? (and who is RaptorJIT not for?)

Thoughts?

[lukego]

Here's my braindump to kick things off. Fight me :-)

The long-term target group for RaptorJIT is people who prefer dynamic languages and want to do high-performance system programming. Suppose your favourite language is something like Python, perl, Ruby, Javascript, Lisp, etc but you are about to write a program in C for the sake of performance. RaptorJIT is the best-of-both-world saviour that gives you high-level dynamic language semantics in this domain.

The shorter-term target group are refugees from LuaJIT. People who are developing and maintaining serious applications and don't want them to become obsolete. People who don't want to hear "oh you're using LuaJIT? isn't that project dead?" from their potential contributors. People who struggle to onboard new developers who must quickly learn to write consistently fast code.

I don't see PUC Lua users as the target group. If you don't need C-like performance, for example because you are writing Lua code mostly to script a C application that does the heavy lifting, then to me it makes sense to stick with PUC Lua and that community.

So why Lua? Because it's a simple and beautiful language with excellent documentation that is quick and painless to learn for people from diverse backgrounds. (This was my thinking when I adopted LuaJIT for Snabb -- I had never written a line of Lua before in my life.)