Re: Protocol Specification in Lua

[Petr Štetiar <ynezz@...>]

John Passaniti <john@japanisshinto.com> [2010-10-01 14:53:18]:

Hi,

[snip]

> The generation of code from the protocol description isn't driven by a
> fear of the efficiency of Lua.  It's driven by the fact that I don't
> think Lua is going to be running on a 8-bit Freescale HCS08
> microcontroller running at 24MHz anytime soon.  And the larger
> platform the C code targets is a ColdFire that has about 16k of RAM
> left over and about twice that in ROM.  Yes, I'm one of those embedded
> systems guys who hangs out in this mailing list to remind everyone
> that while Lua can go lots of places, it can't go everywhere.

It's a shame, you couldn't use Lua directly. Otherwise is quite easy and
comfortable to send just compiled Lua table along with checksum over the UDP.
In the short something like <size><bytecode><crc> in the packet. Imagine, that
the Lua tables can contain functions, so the possibilities of such protocol
are endless.

Back to your subject. I would take a look at Metalua, using it, you can easily
generate your C protocol parser code for the Coldfire just by parsing your
protocol specification in Lua.

-- ynezz