Java vs. Lua vs. Scala vs. TotalView Comparison Chart

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.

TotalView debugging software provides the specialized tools you need to quickly debug, analyze, and scale high-performance computing (HPC) applications. This includes highly dynamic, parallel, and multicore applications that run on diverse hardware — from desktops to supercomputers. Improve HPC development efficiency, code quality, and time-to-market with TotalView’s powerful tools for faster fault isolation, improved memory optimization, and dynamic visualization. Simultaneously debug thousands of threads and processes. Purpose-built for multicore and parallel computing, TotalView delivers a set of tools providing unprecedented control over processes and thread execution, along with deep visibility into program states and data.