As I've been learning C and working on various Playdate projects, I've been wondering: just how much faster is C than Lua for Playdate games? 
OpenFL and some other libraries out there have used a benchmark called Bunnymark that bounces a bunch of bunnies around on the screen in increasing amounts to see when frames start to drop. So I built a similar version for Playdate in both Lua and C.
Max stable bunnies:
| 30 FPS | 50 FPS | |
|---|---|---|
| Lua | 240 | 120 |
| C | 810 | 430 |
| Ratio | 3.4× | 3.6× |
Key takeaway: Based on this one approach and benchmark, it C seems to be about 3.5x faster than Lua on Playdate.
This isn't the most robust and scientific experiment. And it's really focused on a draw-heavy workflow. But it's interesting nonetheless!
While I don't think this is revelatory (it's known that C will be more performant), I think knowing the difference is helpful when undertaking a project that might need to squeeze out as much performance as possible.
Reference and inspiration:
By comparison, on my M2 MacBook Pro, I get about 55,000 bunnies in Tetra (Rust +
SDL3) before frames start to drop.
For those curious, the source is available here:
And the v1.0 release .pdx files are available to download here: Release v1.0 · brettchalupa/pdbunnymark · GitHub