Serializing Closures in Lua

[Brian Chin <naerbnic@...>]

I'm making a game system, in which I require to save the internal state 
of the Lua virtual machine. For stuff like C++, this is normally fairly 
easy, since it's just data. However, in Lua, closures are a pain to 
serialize. Has anyone ever had to do something similar, and if so can 
you give me any hints as to this problem?
On a related note, I was wondering if the code contained in luac should 
mostly be moved into the lua core itself. Since we have the ability to 
load binary files from the core, I would think it would make sense to be 
able to dump them too. There would be some problems from user defined 
structures, but I would imagine some sort of dump function in the meta 
table, and some callback in the loading function would possibly make it 
easier. Any input would be appreciated.
- Brian