Re: bit.lshift and performance - luabitop v.s. lua-5.2.0-work4

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

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Enrico Colombini <erix@erix.it> wrote:
> I remember having to write horrible Lua bit ops workarounds just to be able
> to make small changes to data files.

Yes, it's often a question of notational convenience and knowing when
to get closer to the machine.

Part of the problem is that we need a higher-level way to express
these operations. I'm thinking of a recent thread about describing
packet structures in Lua and either 'interpreting' them directly or
'compiling' them to optimized C.  The first makes testing easy, the
second makes coding with a micro with 4K RAM possible.

Naturally, this is not a new idea, for instance vstruct:

http://www.funkyhorror.net/toxicfrog/projects/vstruct/

Basically, trying to think of a way to transform a problem from the
Von Neumann space to a set of declarations ;)

steve d.