Inling C/Fortran in Lua

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

Of course, luatcc does this already, but does not free you from having
to write the binding code, such as would be generated by tolua++.

Inling performance-critical code can be an effective trick:

http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2006/07/rubyinline-making-making-things-faster.html

Now the question is, is it worth pursuing this for Lua?  tolua++ works
rather nicely, but you have to maintain a separate .c/.cpp file and
hand-roll the .pkg file (the cleaned header).  So, for
proof-of-concept, I'd build on tolua++.  After the first compile, a
quick dependency check means that the inlined code need not be
recompiled.  One has to make sure that the .so/.dll is loadable from
the same location as the original Lua file, etc.

I've been generally thinking about Lua and High-Performance Computing.
 A library like this, plus MPI bindings, and one has a means to write
very effective parallelized programs in a nicer language than FORTRAN.
 Actually, modern FORTRAN is a good companion to Lua in this context,
since it's cleaner and faster than C, especially for things like bulk
array operations and complex arithmetic.

Any thoughts?

steve d.