Re: Reference counting patch for Lua 5.1?

[Joshua Jensen <jjensen@...>]

Matt Campbell wrote:
> I don't wish to debate reference counting versus mark-and-sweep.  I 
> merely wish to try reference counting in my Lua 5.1-based project with 
> a minimum of change (e.g. not switching to LuaPlus).  So does anyone 
> know of a patch that adds reference counting to Lua 5.1?  Of course, I 
> don't mean the Lua reference system, I mean reference counting as an 
> alternative to mark-and-sweep GC.  Thanks.
I believe the standalone LuaRC (for Lua 5.0) on http://luaplus.org/ is 
up to date with the LuaPlus for Lua 5.0 reference counting 
implementation.  While I successfully shipped several products with it, 
I have heard from others that it doesn't handle every case in their own 
Lua development and crashes.  In my opinion, those instances are 
fixable, but I never received repros.

I never moved the reference counting code to Lua 5.1, but I have been 
tempted to do so at times.  A lot of change happened to the Lua core 
between Lua 5.0 and 5.1, and I'd have to pretty much start from scratch 
to bring up the reference counting.

It certainly has its advantages and coupled with the incremental 
collector in Lua 5.1, it would be very fast.  It was satisfying for the 
console work I was doing to know when I create a short-lived string or 
table, they were going to clean themselves up as soon as they go out of 
scope.

Josh