Heliodex project update – December 2024

Happy new year! Small update from the end of last year here.

litecode

Litecode is, solely for the purposes of the larger project I would like to use it in, nearing completion. I ought to change the tagline to something other than "Semi-working Luau bytecode interpreter" at this point lol

I'm taking full advantage of the fact I can break compatibility with the reference implementation in a couple of places. The interpreter now features a faster, simpler, and lighter implementation of tables, at the cost of a few tiny edge cases being different with vanilla Lua/Luau. Bugs are sometimes difficult to track down because of little debugging/error handling support at the moment, though the steadily growing test suite helps a lot with this.

We also now have some benchmark programs to test the speed of the interpreter for optimisations, though I haven't been able to make much progress on that front yet, apart from the aforementioned table implementation, which improves the interpreter from 10-20x slower to more like 1-2x slower than the reference implementation for big tables.