Re: Anchoring co-routines and properly dropping references to allow GC to clean them up

[Chris Gagnon <cgagnon@...>]

Apologizes for the partial email, what a way to introduce myself ;o)

Lets assume we have a MainState, and a "ThreadTable" in the global table

lua_getfield(MainState, LUA_GLOBALSINDEX, "ThreadTable");

lua_State *thread = lua_newthread(MainState);
int refID = luaL_ref(MainState, -2);
lua_pop(MainState,1);

we now have a new thread ready to go essentially that is anchored in our thread table and we balanced the stack.


Consider:
lua_load(thread, ...);
lua_pcall(thread, 0, 0, 0);

we have kicked of our coroutine now, presumably it can call c functions other lua functions yield itself be resumed and so on.
If say i need to kill off my co routines i can empty out the thread table and those co routines should be GC at some point.



The problem i'm running into is how do I remove my reference/anchor, when the coroutine is simply done.

I have a work around in which I simply wrap all my function calls in another lua function like:
    function StartInternal(func, refID, ...)



        func(unpack(arg));
        -- Unregister coroutine
        ThreadTable[refID] = nil;
    end

but i would really like to do away with this.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, i feel like there must be some reasonably obvious way to do this I'm overlooking.



I think it's important to note that performance is very important, which is one of the main reasons i want this wrapper gone.

-Chris