Re: typed arrays

[Dimitris Papavasiliou <dpapavas@...>]

> As the late great Grace Hopper once said, "the wonderful thing about
> standards is that there's so many to choose from'. And that's the
> thing about the Lua ecosystem.  Wrapped native arrays are a good
> thing, very efficient in storage and speed.  I think luaffi is going
> to become one of the semi-canonical libraries, since it allows a
> flexible LuaJIT-compatible way to do C in Lua, but the key word is
> 'semi' ;)

Well luaffi is of course much more powerful but it "pollutes" Lua with
C semantics and syntax.  Don't get me wrong, I love C, but I think
that in cases where Lua is used as an extension/configuration language
the end-user should not be required to know C.  (I also think it looks
a bit ugly and hackish but that's just a matter of personal
aesthetics).  Of course it's ok for writing under-the-hood bindings
and perhaps it would be possible to implement the same functionality
that luarray provides via luaffi.  If so it would also probably be
much easier.

> (LuaRocks does make this all easier because package resolution becomes
> automatic, but I note that both luaffi and luaarray are not in the
> repo. Perhaps an opportunity?)

Yes, I'm not familiar with how that works.  Do I have to create a rock
and submit it for inclusion in LuaRocks?

Dimitris