Re: extended lua value type question

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

> On Nov 11, 2014, at 6:33 AM, Chris Cummings <chrisc@mediamolecule.com> wrote:
> 
> Hmmm - you know what, after more thought I reckon you guys a right - I reckon I'll have to make vectors reference types, even if I do end up making some modifications to the LUA libraries to make allocating/freeing them faster. Relying on the compiler not to have made (valid) assumptions about the behaviour of settable seems too risky.
> 
> Has anyone any experience/examples of adding new types of garbage collectable objects (crucially ones that use their own approach to memory allocation/freeing)?
> 
> -Chris
> 

If you are going with reference types then why not just use a full userdata? This gives you GC behavior and metatables, which should be enough to allow you to deeply integrate your new type into the system (for example, “a + b” semantics for vectors). All you really need to do is wrap type() so that it can return new strings for your userdata types and they are pretty much first class reference types.

—Tim