I hope this question isn't rendered useless by all the factors that effect it (like what you're doing in a language, what kind of system its running on, etc), but in general, of the interpreted languages / virtual machines out where, which one is the fastest, when running under a pure interpreter?

What do I mean by pure? Well, how about some simple rules:

-No JIT recompiling: thats just cheating! (its awesome and fast, but not allowed for this 'contest')

-Bytecode/virtual machines are OK. Just don't define your bytecode to be the same as x86, and then just JMP to it! :)

For now, I want to throw these languages out there: Java, &#106avascript, Lua, Forth, Parrot VM (perl6), perl5, Lisp/scheme<br><br><br>I think of those, Parrot and Forth are the fastest, and Java or &#106avascript the slowest. <br><br>(JIT-Java is super fast, but I've seen interpreted Java runs at a snails pace. Granted, that was a few years ago, but its hard to imagine the actual interpreter getting faster.)

LuaJit has a custom interpreter which i think runs 2x faster than the native one, but even then it's usually considered the fastest native interpreter, you can check out the language shootout page.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

It doesn't have Parrot or Forth on there so I don't know how they stack up and the Lips/Scheme benchmarks are for the compiled versions.

-ddn

Last i looked, Lua was considered the fastest even without JIT i believe (: