Using Lua's string interning for faster compares?

[HyperHacker <hyperhacker@...>]

When I write modules to wrap C++ objects, they usually have a __index
method that does a lot of string comparing, like:
if(!strcmp(key, "foo")) lua_pushcfunction(L, obj_method_foo);
else if(!strcmp(key, "bar")) lua_pushcfunction(L, obj_method_bar);
etc... I'm not sure if compilers can optimize this, but doing all
those strcmp()s every time a method/field is looked up seems terribly
inefficient.

Of course there are various ways to improve on this design (return a
table containing the fields instead of using __index, redirecting the
lookup to a table, etc), but they do have various drawbacks. This
method is nice and simple - just not very fast.

I find myself wondering, why is my module doing dumb string compares
all the time, when Lua fixes this using string interning and hashing?
It could be much more efficient if I could just push the names of my
methods into a table in the registry or some such, and use a method
like lua_tohash() to get their hashes. The series of strcmp()s could
then be changed to a series of much faster integer compares.

-- 
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