Fast loading of very large "symbol" tables

[Canute Bigler <biglerc@...>]

I have need to provide a mapping of "names" to integer values on a 
reasonably large scale (hundreds of thousands).  The name to number 
mapping is known at the compile time of my host program (C++). My basic 
naive approach is to generate a lua source file with the mapping in a 
table and load that script file into the host environment at run-time.  
This approach has a substantial time cost to it and seems like it would 
be more or less unnecessary since the data is static, at least for that 
particular version of the program.


Example:
field = {
   Field1 = 12345,
   Field2 = 45678,
   -- thousands of additional fields and subtables.
}

-- my intended usage.  setData is an exposed API function that takes an 
integer field value and some data to set it to
setData(field.Field1, "abc")


I'm looking for some advice about how I could have this table of 
mappings available in my lua environment without having to pay the cost 
of loading the script every time my program runs.

Thank you in advance