Re: Large number bytecode weirdness on different platforms

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 08:29:03PM -0500, Rici Lake wrote:
> Perhaps for the OP, but I personally think hex floats are a really 
> useful interchange format, particularly now that compiled bytecode 
> isn't.

That problem is annoying: I need both very fast bytecode loading, and
reasonably portable bytecode--that is, portable enough that I can build
bytecode for a target platform on an incompatible build platform, even
if it means reconfiguring Lua a bit.  With embedded targets and cross-
compiling, doing build steps on the target platform is not reasonable.
Fortunately, the last time I had to do this, the only change I needed
was switching Lua to float.

I've thought about using Lua for cache, storing cached values in a table
and writing bytecode to disk.  This would replace XML and other text
formats; binary chunk loading and table construction can be faster than
parsing text.  I avoid binary cache because when something goes wrong,
it's hard to diagnose; I don't have anything but a binary blob.  With
Lua chunks, I can load it into the commandline and examine the table it
outputs.  Compatible bytecode would help this.

-- 
Glenn Maynard