Re: Executing a script multiple times

[Thomas Harning <harningt@...>]

On Sep 29, 2008, at 12:57 PM, Juan Manuel Alvarez wrote:
> ....
> looking and I found something in the documentation about pcall: "Then
> the program calls lua_pcall, which pops the chunk from the stack and
> runs it in protected mode", so I finally discovered what my error was
> =o)
>
> Now I have some questions: How much does luaL_loadbuffer affect
> performance? Is there any way to precompile a script from the C API
> and call it multiple times? (since I only found a way to precompile it
> from command-line).

luaL_loadbuffer is relatively expensive to the act of calling it's  
data, particularly when it is over uncompiled code since it must  
reparse the text each time.

You could do a lua_pushvalue to copy the chunk before you pcall it...

Ex:

luaL_loadbuffer(your chunk data)
for each time you want to call up your chunk
	lua_pushvalue(L, -1)  // copy it
	for each arg
		lua_push*
	lua_pcall(...)
	// handle values...
lua_pop(1)  // remove your chunk from the stack