Re: Lua 5.1 (beta) now available

[Mike Pall <mikelu-0511@...>]

Hi,

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> There is still work to be done on the Makefiles and installation instructions
> (as per suggestions by Mike Pall and others), and also on the manual,

Well, since you mention the manual:

- LUA_COMPAT_FIND is gone but still mentioned in the manual.

- luaopen_* functions must be lua_call()'ed (chapter 5 and changes).

- A big fat warning about the side-effects of DirectX/Direct3D
  is needed in the manual (and maybe in INSTALL, too):

    A warning for users of DirectX/Direct3D: You MUST set the
    D3DCREATE_FPU_PRESERVE flag upon initialization when you
    use Lua in the same thread. Otherwise you'll encounter
    strange behaviour -- complain to Microsoft, not to us.

Misc. other things:

- The difference between the 'posix' target and the 'bsd' target
  is the use of dlopen() plus the -Wl,-E option for the GNU linker.
  Technically this has little to do with BSD anymore. Maybe this
  target should be renamed "posixdl" and the instructions should
  recommend trying this one first.

- The module directories should be created and strict.lua should
  be installed. Any number of messages on the list in the future
  will probably recommend to use lua -lstrict and this doesn't
  work if not installed by default.

- etc/lua.pc should include variables for the standard/preferred
  module directories to install modules.

- Even after a few days of discovering it, I'm not sure what
  table.maxn() is good for. IMHO it's superfluous and may
  confuse newbies.

- I suggest to make the NaN tests explicit and overridable:

    #define luai_numisnan(a) ((a)!=(a))

  [In case anyone wonders: isnan() is only defined in C99.]

  This macro should be used in luaH_set() and constfolding().
  But I'm not sure I found all instances of this test (which
  is another good reason for making it explicit).

> but we want to freeze 5.1 beta so that we can concentrate on 5.1 final,
> which we still plan to release by the end of the year.

Xmas is in 5 weeks. :-)

Bye,
     Mike