Java vs. Lua vs. OCaml vs. Solver SDK 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.

Use optimization and simulation models in your desktop, Web or mobile application. Use the same high-level objects (like Problem, Solver, Variable and Function), collections, properties and methods across different programming languages. The same object-oriented API is exposed "over the wire" through Web Services WS-* standards to remote clients in PHP, JavaScript, C# and other languages. Procedural languages can use conventional calls that correspond naturally to the properties and methods of the Object-Oriented API. Linear and quadratic programming, mixed-integer programming, smooth nonlinear optimization, global optimization, and non-smooth evolutionary and tabu search are all included. The world's best optimizers, from Gurobi™, XPRESS™ and MOSEK™ for linear, quadratic and conic models to KNITRO™, SQP and GRG methods for nonlinear models "plug into" Solver SDK. Easily create a sparse DoubleMatrix object with 1 million rows and columns.