Interesting discussion. Definitely something for the Lua programmers to keep in mind, as the default number implementation type is a C double. I did a quick test on my ancient MacBook, and the translation of the C++ code into Lua showed a slowdown for the denormalized case, although not as dramatic as the original problem (note: I changed the iteration count from 9,000,000 to 900,000 because the original count took way too long).