Re: Lua strings as "atoms"???

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 17-May-05, at 7:08 AM, Mike Pall wrote:

> You'd need a new internal type value for that. And then special
> case all equality comparisons.

Yes

>  And provide for some way to migrate
> a stack string to a (unique) heap string (and back?).

No. It would just be an object, like a Number. You'd never have to
heapify it.

>  And I bet there are a few more pitfalls.

Possibly. But it might still be worth it.

> I can think of only one use case: processing lots of short strings
> in sequence (passing them back and forth to string.* functions).

Exactly. But that's not uncommon.

> But as soon as you store a string in a table or index a table with it,
> you pay the heap allocation overhead, anyway.

See above,