too many items in a constructor

[Dimitris Papavasiliou <jimmyp@...>]

I was rather disturbed this afternoon after getting the following error from

lua for the first time:

too many items in a constructor (limit=262143) near `,'

It wasn't the first time I tried to create huge tables in lua as I'm using it

to load various kinds of data I need like images(textures), geometry(models),

audio etc. By diabolical luck (or lack of it) though the biggest thing I had

tried to load so far was a 256x256 RGBA image which has 65536 4-component

pixels for a total of 262144 elements which is *right on* the limit. Trying

to load a 512*512 RGBA texture failed.

Well I say I was disturbed initially because I thought this would easily be

taken care of by just changing some #define constant in the lua sources and

recompiling but I soon discovered that the problem is the size of the

registers in the lua vm so now I've moved on to being quite worried.

The problem is that the constructor opcode uses the Bx register to specify the

total number of elements (I think) which is 18 bits long. I tried making the

B and C registers 25 bits long each which would give me a 50 bit Bx register

(with all the registers being 64 bits wide) but I got a whole bunch of

serious-looking warnings during compile.

Is there anything that can be done to give me bigger constructors, like say at

least 4M elements? I'm really counting on loading data using lua in my

overall design so I'm in really big trouble if this isn't possible.