Re: Speed of Lua's immutable strings vs buffers (split from Re: Pooling of strings is good)

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Tuesday, August 26, 2014, Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@gmail.com> wrote:

co> Twist that dagger a little deeper, eh? :p  Introducing a buffer type

co> and metatable interface to it was not my idea.  I was hoping to learn
co> from upstream how I might trick Lua's typechecking functions into
co> believing userdata were strings and getting it to safely access the
co> ->buf portion of the userdata (rather than the similar data member in
co> the TString struct).

You cannot expect in any way a C function to understand an additional unit type without modifying (or replacing) it.

sean> I applaud Jan Behrens' work on
sean> ipairs because he's taking the time to implement his ideas.

Back the days where the list was heavily loaded with arguments about #-operator and broken sequences ("arrays with holes") a rule was concluded: if you make a suggestion and expect the core team to take their time with it, take your time and provide a patch with your suggestion.

Alex,

Give it time. I promise you, we're still in those days. :)

-Andrew