Re: Lua 5.1+ and variable-argument tables

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

By the way, the timings in that last post demonstrate the importance of
malloc/free over marking: mark is almost free since there is only one 
live varargs tuple/table at any moment, but all of the blocks need to 
be malloc()'d
and free()'d. Reducing the number of allocs per vararg from three to 
one should reduce the memory management cost by 2/3, and that is pretty 
well precisely what the benchmark demonstrated.

At the same time, it appears that the cost of varargs with the current 
implementation is roughly the base cost of a function call; if the 
function did anything complicated, the overhead would be a lot less 
noticeable. So reducing
the overhead by 2/3 is probably sufficient.

R.