Re: typed arrays

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Tom <tmbdev@gmail.com> wrote:
>> because if you're in an application that has that high of performance
>> needs you're
>>
>> probably using LuaJIT anyway, and if you're interfacing with unrelated
>> C libraries you're probably dealing in C data structures already.
>
>
> Efficient numerical and matrix computing in scripting languages (Octave,
> NumPy, R, ...) works by having a standard array type that every library
> uses.  No access to C data types is needed beyond that, and LuaJIT really
> doesn't help (I've never used it in any application).
>
> Tom
>

The thing about Lua is that you can get all of these gains in a
library. You don't need support for it in the language core.

So for an example of a library providing these features, consider
SciLua: http://www.scilua.org/sci_alg.html

I haven't used it because this isn't within my use case (I'm primarily
a C++ programmer and I use Lua for embedded scripting, so anything
like this I'd need I'd be doing C++-side instead of Lua-side) so I
can't cite available alternatives or provide meaningful critique; I
just happen to know about SciLua and its feature set includes many of
the things you're asking for.

/s/ Adam