Talos V1 vs Prometheus
A direct comparison using the packaged Prometheus CLI. Shorter bars are better.
What was measured?
Each bar adds the measured medians for six scripts both engines completed at every preset: arithmetic, closures, 200 statements, repeated constants, cold strings, and an unused 70 KB string. Comparison labels show Talos V1's speed multiplier or percentage reduction in file size against Prometheus, using these totals. The large-string tests have a strong effect on these totals. Each chart uses the same scale across all protection levels.
Nine independently generated variants were each executed nine times in Luau 0.741 on one Apple Silicon Mac. Generation measures whole CLI wall time for both engines, including process startup, input reading, output writing and random seeding. Execution includes VM initialization, decryption and decompression, and excludes Lua compilation and process startup. File sizes use KiB (1,024 bytes).
The baseline is the official packaged Prometheus CLI v0.2.11.1 with its bundled Lua runtime and LuaU target. Light is paired with Minify, Balanced with Medium, and Strong with Strong. These settings do not guarantee equivalent protection. All executions in this matched comparison returned the same results as the original source.
These results describe this machine and test set. They measure speed and size; resistance to reverse engineering was not tested. The comparison report and data download cover the same six workloads shown here.