Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work1) now available

[Todd Coram <todd@...>]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013, at 11:45 AM, Joseph Manning wrote:
> On 2013-Jul-09 (Tue) at 17:23 (+0200), Lorenzo Donati wrote:
> 
> >> Just for curiosity: what is the rationale behind this version bump
> >> with this new "int" transparent mechanism? It seems that it
> >> complicates the innards of Lua a lot and appears useful mostly for
> >> people working with some "float hostile" environments.
> 
> Lorenzo,
> 
>    Well, if nothing else, it gives us direct support for integers
>    up to 2^63-1 rather than 2^53-1 ( assuming 64-bit ).  To me at least,
>    this is a genuine benefit.
> 
>    ( wow ... over a THOUSAND times as many integers ... woo-hoo! )
> 
> Joseph


I too am very happy to see what 5.3 is doing with ints. When I do data
encoding/decoding protocol work (e.g. Google Protocol Buffers, BSON,
etc), it would be very nice  to properly handle 64 bit integers in pure
Lua. This will go a long way to making Lua a first class player in data
protocol manipulation!

/todd