Re: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

[Peter Odding <xolox@...>]

Lothar Scholz wrote:
> I must say i think the same same. I like the programming model but it
> is very slow and i really don't know why the design of lua wants to
> use slow hashtable access anywhere. 
It's not `really slow' unless you compare it against a language compiled to 
machine code. Which isn't fair. Lua is actually the fastest scripting language 
in a lot of comparisons. And then there's always LuaJIT (if you're on x86).

> My performance tests show that for function calls there is a lot  (i really
> mean a lot) room for optimization.
Note that you used the term function calls (as opposed to method calls) so the 
assumption Gé Weijers made seems correct to me. Even if method calls are purely 
:syntactical().

> And by the way, please offer real arrays ...
As Gé Weijers pointed out, as long as your arrays are not sparse and count from 
1 .. N they already behave the way you want them to. Seems good enough? Anyways 
if you really want them, just write your own. Shouldn't take long.

> and a builtin performance optimized object system soon.
Please don't do this to Lua! The whole point about OO in Lua is that it's 
optional and along with half the Lua community I'd like to keep it that way.

One last thing, adding these `features' would not be a `by the way' for the Lua 
authors. They're always balancing simplicity vs. features. Which is one of the 
reasons I like Lua so much -- The Lua source is small enough to be comprehensible.

Thanks for your time,

 - Peter Odding