Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work1) now available

[Eric Wing <ewmailing@...>]

I was a little surprised by that given that integers would
> seem most useful on more restricted platforms where 64-bit integer is still
> (moderately) expensive (and also even that many "64-bit" OSes are compiled
> with 32-bit integers, such as OS X).

That's not quite an accurate representation of the need for 64-bit
integers on 64-bit OS's. OS X is fully 64-bit now and 32-bit has been
deprecated for awhile. (The current OS X requires a 64-bit system and
the majority of Mac apps have already made the switch to 64-bit.)
While I don't know what size/types they are using in the kernel, all
the Cocoa related frameworks are using NSInteger/NSUInteger which on
64-bit Mac is a full blown 64-bit number (and has been so since at
least 2007). This has been a huge pain in binding any OS X related
APIs with Lua because the numbers get silently mutilated.


My guess for the defaults is that restricted/embedded systems are
probably going to tweak luaconf.h for their environment anyway, so
there is no point worrying about producing defaults that everybody can
interoperate with there because it's not actually going to happen.

It's distributions that people are worried about the defaults for
interoperability and those will be predominately on traditional
computers and the large majority of those will be 64-bit machines.

(Still I could see an argument for a default #ifdef check for those
legacy 32-bit desktop computers, where they use 32-bit int and
double.)

I am really excited about the new integer support in Lua 5.3!

Thanks,
-Eric
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Beginning iPhone Games Development
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