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On Nov 2, 2009, at 4:06 PM, Mike Pall wrote:

Mark Hamburg wrote:
To what extent did you change the instruction set v to what extent did
you change the encoding of the instruction set? (I'm thinking about
whether a bytecode translator is even reasonable to consider.)

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-07/msg00256.html
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-07/msg00284.html

Summary: Nope, use source code. Bytecode isn't shorter, anyway.

Oh, and LJ2 doesn't even *have* a bytecode loader/dumper at the
moment. It simply wasn't a priority. Open source projects using
LJ2 have nothing to worry about, since they don't need to hide
their Lua sources.

The idea was to make a commercial add-on for bytecode handling.
But I'm not sure it would pay off (required work + support
overhead vs. money in return). There are cheaper ways to hide your
Lua sources: simply compress and encrypt them. And bytecode is
easy to reverse-engineer, too.

It would be nice to save the parse step when loading though perhaps some of Michael Franz's work prior to tracing JITs is relevant to that problem.

Mark