News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

frityet

Re:Show HN: LuaJIT with Native SIMD on Sunday July 26, 2026 @06:27PM (#49063071)
Hello! With help from Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol, you can now write LuaJIT code that gets compiled to efficient and fast SIMD instructions (just for x86-64 for now, but aarch64 eventually too)!

> Why SIMD?

There's a lot in LuaJIT (mainly with games, but also parsers, ML, etc) that is quite limited with how LuaJIT cannot compile to SSE/AVX instructions and use their extended registers, but now it can!

> Why FFI vector types instead of Lua tables?

Keeps implementation much simpler and much faster, + it makes you be more careful how you are structuring and writing your code.

> Compatability?

This fork adds new bytecode and a new ffi.simd module, but is fully backwards compatible.

> Current limitations

Biggest issue is that it is x86-64 only, but I am going to be adding aarch64 support soon. Also, no AVX512 backend (I do not have an AVX512 CPU), 8 and 64 byte vectors are interpreter only, no JIT. Only 8 and 16 byte vectors can be used in external FFI calls (same as regular LuaJIT rules), use pointers for 32 byte ones.

Re:Why Objective-C on Sunday March 01, 2026 @07:47AM (#47206232)
Good time to check out ObjFW [1], it's a cross platform ObjC framework that's just really awesome

[1] https://git.nil.im/ObjFW/ObjFW