Re: [ANN] Luabins ? Trivial Lua Binary Serialization Library

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 4:18 AM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> >> I wrote a small and simple library called "luabins" to serialize and
> >> unserialize trivial Lua values (including tables) into arbitrary
> >> binary data format.

> > My approach to this problem is to use Lua bytecode format instead of
> > inventing yet another binary format.

<...>

> I've seen your solution. But I have some problems with it:

> 1. Lua bytecode is unsafe and may crash Lua. <...>

Sorry, I've got carried away. Problem 1 is sufficient in our case.

Unless Lua bytecode is somehow proven as crash-safe as Lua sources, it
may not be used as a data format.

Of course, my custom binary format is not proven safe as well. But
both format and implementation are much simpler than Lua bytecode and
Lua VM -- they are designed to solve much simpler problems.

Also, how do I protect from, say, infinite loops embedded into
bytecode I'm about to load? Putting hooks or pre-parsing it is likely
to degrade performance considerably.

Alexander.