Re: Optimizations during compilation

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

on 6/18/04 11:00 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy at roberto@inf.puc-rio.br wrote:

> A nice project would be a source-code optimizer for Lua (which could be
> used as a pre-processor for luac, for instance). It could easily perform
> constant propagation, common-subexpression ellimination (eventually with
> switches to control how much it could assume about metamethods), loop
> optimizations, etc.

A good starting point might be a Lua-based intermediate format for Lua code
with a parser to generate it and a back end to consume it and convert it to
code for the VM. I probably wouldn't run the compiler through this format
for speed reasons, but it could make an interesting Lua library. How
interesting and where it would rank in the priorities is a different matter.

Mark