RE: Timing out LUA programs

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>]

On Wed, 2002-06-19 at 15:25, Jeff Petkau wrote:

> That is insulting and backwards. Nobody here has said that coroutines
> are the solution to all problems; rather, that coroutines are an
> excellent solution to this specific problem. You're pulling out all
> kinds of hammers and saying "use this instead!" I don't want a hammer,
> I want the right tool for the job.
> 
> And of course it's true that there are other ways to obtain the same
> result. If all else fails we could just do everything in hand-coded
> assembly. But that's not a productive use of time. Likewise, the
> explicit state management that you're forced to do when coroutines
> are not available is not a productive use of time.

No one said get rid of co-routines - saying get something in addition to
co-routines, i.e. a fast an optimized schedular in the Lua core (versus
tricks and hacks in Lua byte-code), and maybe even a pre-emptive or
soft-pre-emptive system for thread switching.

People argue that making game scripters worry about race conditions and
such is bad - I make the same argument that trying to teach them to
break scripts up into small pieces is bad.  A compromise is needed.  One
can be coded that allows either system to exist, even simultaneously
(with some cleverness).

This has been discussed over and over, and doesn't seem like it's going
happen - Lua is just not going to be _the_ game scripting language, it
seems, and that's that.

> 
> --Jeff