A milestone we have been chasing quietly for weeks: on our benchmark suite, the plain SCUA interpreter now beats the Lua 5.4 interpreter on the overall score of both tiers, the micro kernels and the realistic workloads.
No flags, nothing to opt into. scua yourscript.scua is
roughly twice as fast as before on call-heavy code, recursion,
callbacks, and small helper functions; element-typed
{ f64 } buffer loops are more than twice as fast; array
pushes, field access, division, and float math all took real steps. Same
results, same errors, same limits.
This matters most exactly where the JIT can never help. Consoles and iOS forbid runtime code generation, so on those platforms the interpreter is the runtime, full stop. It now holds its own against the interpreter that has defined "fast scripting" for twenty years. The suite and the current board live in the repo, dated, if you want the lane-by-lane picture.