Re: Question about Lua 5.1.3 and realloc() on life.lua

["Bogdan Marinescu" <bogdan.marinescu@...>]

So that was it. It makes sense now, thank you. Still I wonder if a
strategy to realloc a minimum delta of memory (say 16 bytes) wouldn't
prevent situations like this without having much impact on the overall
memory consumption. I think I'll test this and see where it goes.

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Mike Pall <mikelu-0805@mike.de> wrote:
> Bogdan Marinescu wrote:
>  > I ran 'life.lua', and the results surprised me. Specifically, I can see lots
>  > and lots of realloc calls with a one byte difference between the old block
>  > size and the new block size, in both directions (+1 or -1 difference).
>
>  This particular program spends most of its time doing char-by-char
>  string concatenation in a tight loop. This is not a recommended
>  practice and hopefully not representative for professionally
>  written Lua programs.
>
>  Most of the stuff in the test directory should be ignored. It
>  exhibits bad programming practice (e.g. no locals), people have
>  been abusing these for benchmarking Lua and despite the directory
>  name it's not a test suite at all. It gives newcomers a bad first
>  impression of Lua. This was discussed two years ago, but nothing
>  happened.
>
>  --Mike
>