Re: lua_lock

[Veijo Vilva <vilva@...>]

On Thu, Nov 13, 1997 at 05:05:48PM -0200, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
>   The Lua reference mechanism (Section 5.6 of the manual) has an
> option that allows C to keep a reference to a Lua object without preventing
> the GC to collect the object. Does anyone use this option? It was supposed
> to be useful in breaking 'reference cicles', when C keeps a reference to a
> Lua object and Lua keeps a reference to the C object (userdata), and then they
> would be never collected. But we are not sure whether anyone ever succeed in
> using it...
> 
> -- Roberto
> 

  I have used it to achieve a moderate speed-up in a bytecode interpreter
  iterating over largish datasets.

  Instead of

      lua_callfunction(lua_getglobal("my_lua_function"))

  I have 

      lua_callfunction(ref_to_my_lua_function)

  within the innermost loop.
      
    Veijo

-- 
 Veijo Vilva                        vilva@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi
 Dept. Animal Science               http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/people/vilva
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