LUA is FFOC

LUA is the toy language for those who enjoy the Forced Flushing Of L1/L2 Cache per operation. In fact, every operation causes several L2 cache misses during table look-ups, flushing both the L1 and L2 caches.

http://www.slideshare.net/hughreynolds/optimizing-lua-for-consoles-allen-murphy-microsoft

Enjoy your FFOC.

Doesn't Lua's JIT assume that the mostly-read tables (such as _G) remain read-only until the JIT is explicitly told they have been modified (via a `check your damn assumptions' flag)? I don't feel like reading its sauce right nao, but I would guess its author would have been smart enough not to execute an entire damn hash table lookup at almost every VM cycle.