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Since a few weeks LuaJitTeX is available ¹, which is LuaTeX with Lua replaced by LuaJIT. Binaries are available for various platforms. It is already included in the ConTeXt standalone distribution.

I wonder which sort of documents benefit from using LuaJitTeX? If non-standard fonts are used XeTeX is a good choice, if MetaPost is involved LuaTeX is a good choice, just to give an example.

  • What's exactly the use case for LuaJitTeX?
  • Does it ever make sense to turn Jit on (in contrast to just using the virtual machine of LuaJitTeX)? The ConTeXt help states: --jiton jit turned on (in most cases not faster, even slower) and running a small test suggests that it really appears to be slower. I don't know if that is always the case and I wonder if there are any counter examples.

¹ The source code can be obtained with: svn co http://foundry.supelec.fr/svn/luajittex/trunk. The binaries can be found on http://svn.contextgarden.net/suite-bin/tex/.

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Marco
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1 Answers1

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I use luajittex whenever possible with our database publishing system. It gives me a huge performance gain (~30%) compared to the regular luatex binary.

99% of our code is Lua, so the gain is expected and probably cannot be achieved with normal LaTeX packages (I'd expect a 5% gain at most).

Currently I don't turn the JIT on. Perhaps in the future I will do that. First I need more testing if the binaries on all the required platforms (mac/linux/win 32bit and 64 bit) are "bug free" (whatever that means).

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