This benchmark has been misleading for a while. It was originally made to demonstrate how JIT compilers can do all sorts of crazy stuff to your code - especially LuaJIT - and was meant to be a starting point of discussion about what exactly LuaJIT does and how.
As a result, its not indicative of what its performance may be on more realistic data. Differences can be expected because
- the text will not consist of hard-coded constants
- the number of words (and therefore the dictionary) would be larger, and JIT compilers for JS and Lua often have special optimizations for small dictionaries/tables
- the words wont be pre-split, and allocating new words adds significant performance penalty (in that case a trie would probably outperform other approaches)
that last C code is cheating btw, it's comparing pointer to array of char, not comparing the array of char (string) itself
so it wouldn't give same result if the string is from user input / not constants.