Re: [ANN] Lua 5.2.1 (work1) now available

[Enrico Colombini <erix@...>]

On 22/03/2012 16.57, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
> This patch does not change anything in the semantics of Lua. The
> interning of strings always has been and continues to be invisible to
> the programmer. It only afects performance, in both directions.
> (There is a cost for interning a string.)

Yes, that is clear.

> So, the question is: thus the savings in not interning some strings
> compensates the losses in performance in indexing some strings? The only
> way that I see to answer that is profiling real programs.

That's a valid point and something that certainly needs to be done; I'm 
looking at the matter from a slightly different viewpoint: many things 
are configurable in Lua (either at compile time or at runtime) to 
achieve a better efficiency for a particolar purpose; it would be useful 
to still have the possibility to intern all strings.

--
  Enrico