Re: embedded lua: invocation overhead?

["David Burgess" <dburgess@...>]

My personal experience is this:

1) You can find embeddable script languages that are smaller
and faster than Lua. But at a complexity, stability and
maintability price. As Mike points out, calls to Lua via pcall()
are rather quick.

2) I  maintain 4 projects that use script similar to the model that
you describe. Two of these projects are not Lua, two are Lua.
I wish that I had used Lua for all of them, the reasons:
stability, support from this list, easy to maintain code, simple
problem diagnosis. In one of these applications we have embedded
Lua code that performs simple text reformatting on large
volumes of data (up to 10Mb per second), this code has been
running on servers for 2 years without fault, peak usage would
be approx. 1e5 invocations of Lua script per second..

3) Once you embed a script interpreter in an application it is
not always easy to change. So I would recommend some serious
prototyping/testing/benchmarking  before you make your
choice.

db