Re: Compiler Optimizations

["Chris Swetenham" <cswetenham@...>]

I've thought about this a few times - are there any common or useful use
cases of metatables where the assumption that metatable functions are
idempotent (that is, the program state is the same after calling the
function once as it is after calling it twice), AND that they only modify
the table they are associated with, would lead to incorrect semantics?

An obvious and trivial example is a metatable that counts accesses to a
table, but this would usually be used for debugging/profiling rather than in
production; I've not been able to think of any other examples.

Making this assumption would allow a compiler to cache the results of table
accesses within a scope, invalidating them over function calls but not table
accesses.

Chris Swetenham

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Hamburg" <mhamburg@adobe.com>
To: "Lua list" <lua@bazar2.conectiva.com.br>
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 4:53 PM
Subject: Re: Compiler Optimizations


> * For almost everything else, the metatable semantics make optimization
> almost impossible.
>
> Mark