I know it's what they meant, because they were very precise about it, just not very accommodating to people unfamiliar with the terrain. This is the kind of intro I had in mind:
> "The standard architecture of a JIT compiler (like V8, Java HotSpot or LuaJIT) includes both a bytecode interpreter, and a system to recompile a function to native code at runtime. The interpreter is the slow path in a JIT compiler, and is also a general bottleneck in a purely-interpreted VM like CPython. Since we are writing a Lua interpreter and LuaJIT's is the state of the art, the baseline for performance here will be LuaJIT with its JIT turned off."
This means the same thing as the whole "28% faster than LuaJIT's interpreter" business, but nobody comes away from reading that thinking this is faster than LuaJIT as a whole.
> "The standard architecture of a JIT compiler (like V8, Java HotSpot or LuaJIT) includes both a bytecode interpreter, and a system to recompile a function to native code at runtime. The interpreter is the slow path in a JIT compiler, and is also a general bottleneck in a purely-interpreted VM like CPython. Since we are writing a Lua interpreter and LuaJIT's is the state of the art, the baseline for performance here will be LuaJIT with its JIT turned off."
This means the same thing as the whole "28% faster than LuaJIT's interpreter" business, but nobody comes away from reading that thinking this is faster than LuaJIT as a whole.