Elm vs. JavaScript vs. Lua vs. PureScript Comparison Chart

Elm uses type inference to detect corner cases and give friendly hints. NoRedInk switched to Elm about four years ago, and 300k+ lines later, they still have not had to scramble to fix a confusing runtime exception in production. The compiler guides you safely through your changes, ensuring confidence even through the most widereaching refactorings in unfamiliar codebases. Including your own, six months later. All Elm programs are written in the same pattern, eliminating doubt and lengthy discussions when deciding how to build new projects and making it easy to navigate old or foreign codebases. Elm has its own virtual DOM implementation, designed for simplicity and speed. All values are immutable in Elm, and the benchmarks show that this helps us generate particularly fast JavaScript code.

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.