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

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Coroutines once stated:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 11:35 PM, Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> My suggestion was not something I could do myself.  I wanted an
> interface provided by upstream to have userdata look like strings
> where lua_isstring() or similar are used.  Quick, lemme go figure out
> an anti-gravity device because that's what I'm suggesting now --
> should be done by mid-afternoon.

  Hypothetical situation:  you maintain a software package used by a sizable
number of people.  One person pipes in asking for a change in how it works. 
Do you do it?  What if it's not a simple change?  Or it's more than one
poerson, but less than 1% of the people who are using it are asking for the
change?  Okay, step it up---you are getting multiple, mutually exclusive
requests for changes?  Or maybe they're not mutually exclusive, but changes
that just (to you) clutter up the program?

  Another point of reference:  given the nature of Lua releases, *even if*
PUC was going to make the change, it wouldn't be immediately available, and
it won't be backported to existing versions.

  -spc