Re: How to exchange the values of a specific variable (e.g: maybe a table) between Lua_States?

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Paul Ducklin once stated:
> >How to exchange the values of a specific 
> variable (e.g: maybe a table) between Lua_States? 
> 
> Try dkjson. 
> 
> Encode table in state A  -> Pass JSON as a string message to state B ->
> Decode table in state B.
> 
> Easy.
> 
> Obviously you can’t pass userdata keys or values in the table you send
> across (userdata variables are typically full of pointers, malloc()ed
> buffers and system handles, etc. ). You can only copy over only strings
> and numbers.

  Or try CBOR [1].  My implementation [2][3] can handle keys other than
strings or integers, and can even handle cycles in tables.  Encoding this
table:

	local x
	x = 
	{
	  [1] = true,
	  [false] = "nah",
	  [true] = "one",
	  [42] = "meaning of life",
	  [math.pi] = 3.000000,
	  [math.huge] = 'too large',
	  [math.maxinteger] = 'this is fine',
	  ['NaN'] = 0/0,
	  [0] = false,
	}

is no issue.  [5]

> If you want to pass open LuaSockets, however, there is a neat trick where
> you extract the fd from the socket in state A using the socket:getfd()
> method, pass it as a number (it is just a numeric file handle), graft it
> into an unconnected socket in state B using socket:setfd(), and then
> invalidate the fd in the original socket in state A so the fd doesn’t get
> close()d when the “donor” socket gets garbage-collected.

  That works as long as the the two Lua states are in the same process.

  Back in 2017 I did some playing around with serializing Lua functions [4].
I didn't finalize anything, but I did come up with some interesting
solutions to some of the issues.  CBOR also allows values to be semantically
tagged.  Using this, I would encode known Lua values, like io.stdin, as a
string, but tagged as a "Lua global".  Such semantic tagging could also be
used for other userdata, functions, etc.

  -spc

[1]	Concise Binary Object Representation

[2]	https://github.com/spc476/CBOR

[3]	Also available via Luarocks as "org.conman.cbor".

[4]	https://github.com/spc476/LuaFunctionSerialize

[5]	Try that with JSON!