Wren:
LuaJIT is run with the JIT disabled (i.e. in bytecode interpreter mode)[...] LuaJIT with the JIT enabled is much faster than all of the other languages benchmarked, including Wren, because Mike Pall is a robot from the future.
Hello, JIT World: The Joy of Simple JITs:
DynASM is also exceptionally small and unimposing; its entire runtime is contained in a 500-line header file.
A big thanks to Mike Pall for creating Dynasm, the framework that helped quickly construct the code generator in two days. It is quality work.
This branch contains PoC implementaton of transparent JIT for PHP. JIT itself is implemented as a part of Opcache.
#PHP's experimental JIT branch is currently 54% faster than PHP7.1. We are in for another huge performance jump in our next major release :)
PHP JIT is using DYNASM_x86 (from the luajit proj) under the hood for code compilation.
LuaJIT: the finest C codebase I ‘ve studied. It’s so elegant, so beautiful and so well designed (both LuaJIT, and the code that implements it). I can’t recommend it enough.
But this is an orthogonal issue.