Incremental garbage collection coming to Lua soon?

Subject: Incremental garbage collection coming to Lua soon?
From: &quot;Benjamin Freidlin&quot; &lt;benfr@ ... &gt;
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 11:02:37 -0500

Take 2: Something is wrong with the list serv…

After reading the "Year in Scripting Languages 2002" I found this excerpt from the Lua section:

Lua in 2003
2003 will bring the official release of Lua 5.0 and also probably Lua 5.1, at least in work stage. Our main focus in Lua 5.1 is the implementation of incremental garbage collection to replace the current atomic mark-and-sweep. The need for this was identified by the community, especially those using Lua for games. We shall probably also see a new draft of the long-waited Lua book by Roberto, updated for Lua 5.

How far off is the release of this and is it still definite? Also, is it the kind of change that would require substantial changes to the Lua scripts themselves or would they see a performance increase (or a reduction in interruption by the GC) automatically?