list of related projects (feel free to edit)

[matu3ba]

Interpreters

• https://github.com/FastVM/Web49 discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850562 and https://github.com/FastVM/minivm-cc
• https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3
• dascript https://dascript.org/ (restricted io, no gc, statically typed, plans LLVM backend)
• ..

Fast JIT compilers.

• Dynasm (https://luajit.org/dynasm.html)
• luajit remake with deegen framework (technical blog post https://sillycross.github.io/2022/11/22/2022-11-22/)
• https://github.com/vnmakarov/mir
• B3 from JavascriptCore (https://webkit.org/docs/b3/)
• dascript
• blink has an interesting section on jitting + environment constrains. Not sure if user-provided instruction fine-tuning with graceful fallback would be useful + feasible or not
• ..

Notable mention (syntax etc)

• Port some programming language benchmarks to Acton actonlang/acton#180 not sure about provided performance, but stuff like https://www.acton-lang.org/learn/acton-by-example/actors/sync_method_call.html sounds interesting.

[fubark]

I tried to run paka, a language that uses minivm but ran into issues running fib.paka. Looks like paka might not have been updated in a while though.

Then I tried out wasm3, I assumed it would be faster but Cyber is 25% faster:

hyperfine 'cyber fib/fib.cy' 'wasm3 --func fib fib/fib32.wasm 30'
Benchmark 1: cyber fib/fib.cy
  Time (mean ± σ):      41.2 ms ±   3.1 ms    [User: 40.9 ms, System: 0.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    36.1 ms …  52.1 ms    55 runs
 
Benchmark 2: wasm3 --func fib fib/fib32.wasm 30
  Time (mean ± σ):      52.7 ms ±   3.1 ms    [User: 52.4 ms, System: 0.5 ms]
  Range (min … max):    47.3 ms …  60.5 ms    50 runs

[dumblob]

@ShawSumma might be of interest to you.

[erlend-sh]

Sharing Discord notes from Darek with some additions.

Production ready

• Luau - https://github.com/Roblox/luau - seems like a good alternative to Lua that fixes the biggest issues and is proven in production
• Teal - https://github.com/teal-language/tl - coupled with regular Lua distribution (Teal might be still too early though)

Embedded languages

• Wren - http://wren.io
• Lobster - http://strlen.com/lobster/
• Squirrel - http://squirrel-lang.org/ - old, was an interesting alternative to Lua, but kind of never took off (www.g5e.com uses it heavily in their games)
• Gravity - http://gravity-lang.org/
• Umka - https://github.com/vtereshkov/umka-lang
• daScript - https://github.com/GaijinEntertainment/daScript - Mainly focused on interop with C++. It's homepage has impressive benchmarks but when I tried running a simple fib example it was incredibly slow. Maybe it has some startup time issues.
• Ark - https://github.com/ArkScript-lang/Ark

Zig-based languages

• https://github.com/fubark/cyber
• https://github.com/MasterQ32/LoLa
• https://github.com/buzz-language/buzz
• https://github.com/Vexu/bog
• https://github.com/Luukdegram/luf

Rust-based languages

• Piccolo (Lua in Rust) - https://github.com/triplehex/piccolo
• Mun - https://mun-lang.org
• Rune - https://github.com/rune-rs/rune
• Koto - https://github.com/koto-lang/koto
• Diatom - https://github.com/diatom-lang/diatom
• Mica - https://github.com/mica-lang/mica
• Rhai - https://github.com/rhaiscript/rhai
• Ashfire/Firelang - https://github.com/LunaAmora/Ashfire

Compiled languages

• Zig - I think this might be the future for low level gamedev, author seems focused on getting the ugly basics right
• V - was promising, but they're very scattered, chasing every shiny new thing, rewriting everything in V, making their own GitHub (gitly), database (vsql), OS (vinix), UI, etc
• Odin
• Beef - https://github.com/beefytech/Beef
• Jai

Other

• Carp - https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
• M - https://github.com/ligangwang/m