On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 2:42 PM, Reuben Thomas
<rrt@sc3d.org> wrote:
On 28 February 2011 19:34, Kevin Vermeer <
reemrevnivek@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for sweating these details. I understand that many of your users may
> never go outside of the infinite memory model popular in desktop
> programming, but some of us embedded programmers are trying to use Lua with
> 64kB or less of RAM, so those 500 bytes make a big difference!
For the same reasons you use it on whatever machine you have.
I could ask you why you don't just use your stdlib library on your system, but it's really not that difficult (as you showed) to write a single line using string.match() to get a table if you want it. This doesn't seem to be unfriendly, ugly, or bizarre as you claim it is. It might be a little inconsistent, but, as Roberto argued, that's a sacrifice that's probably acceptable.
The real issue is that if the language designers chose to spend the 500 bytes every time the question came up, Lua would soon become as big as Python. Lua's small size is a more important than the table/string nature of package.config, and not just to embedded developers.
Peace,
--
Kevin Vermeer
