Re: Features you would like to see

[Javier Guerra Giraldez <javier@...>]

Duck wrote:
> 1. A compile-time directive to select support for 64-bit (or at least 
> 52-bit/53-bit) file offsets in the IO library.

should be the default. on systems that doesn't support big offsets, a 
config.h define should fall back.

> 2. Compile-time (or even run-time!) support for choosing 8-bit, 16-bit 
> or 32-bit "chars" as the basis of strings.
>
> 3. Standardised compile-time selection of a floating point "number" type 
> with more than 64 bits of integer precision.

can't see any sane reason for these.

> And as David B said, I think that Lua needs standardised, albeit 
> optional, libs for sockets (the core C component of LuaSocket would be 
> an ideal candidate here) and for some sort of pre-emptive multithreading 
> (LuaThreads would be an ideal candidate here).

I'd love to agree; but the table implementation is very non-concurrent 
dependent, resulting in almost no multitasking.  that's why most recent 
multitasking libs use the 'many states' model.

> Whichever libs are chosen for the above, they should be capable of being 
> built as shared libraries, or built in, without source modification.

to this i agree wholeheartedly!

> 4. Compile-time directive to require globals to be defined as globals 
> (don't care whether there's a global keyword or not) before use, and not 
> allowing them to burst into life due to a typo :-)

beaten to death before.

--
Javier