Re: Features you would like to see

[Stephen Kellett <lua@...>]

Patrick Donnelly wrote:
> I'm curious what features people would like to see added to Lua.

This comment is from the perspective of a software tool developer. In 
that context I am talking about inspecting Lua internals and Lua objects 
from C.

I'd like to see the ability to actually get a class name for a class 
object. Currently when you query an object for its type (from C) you 
just get "Table", which is not very useful. Its much more useful to know 
that a "Weeble" object is possibly leaking (look there are 10,000 of the 
critters!) rather than noticing the Table count has increased by 10,000.

I was talking with Bob Pappas from Adobe(*) yesterday (we were talking 
about the Lua Memory Validator product I am involved with) and this 
issue came up - he had lots of Table objects but we couldn't tell which 
class/type each object was. It limits the info you can get from a tool 
like Lua Memory Validator (or any tools like it, not that I am aware of 
any others for Lua).

Cheers

Stephen
(*) Sorry the name dropping but I've mentioned this because it did 
happen and it shows that big names are using Lua and interested in 
issues such as this.