Lua 5.4 Released With New Garbage Collection Mode, Warning System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lua 5.4 Released With New Garbage Collection Mode, Warning System

Lua 5.4 shipped today as the newest version of the interpreter for this scripting programming language that is particularly popular for embedding within games and other applications...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lua-5.4-Released

[KaoDome]

Go Lua go!

[cbxbiker61]

Migrating packages from Lua 5.3 to 5.4 seems to be pretty straightforward, By default 5.4 has backward compatibility to 5.3 enabled. Some of the previous version changes were a lot harder to manage.

[JustinTurdeau]

Some of the previous version changes were a lot harder to manage.

Which changes in 5.{1,2,3} have been hard to manage?

[tuxd3v]

Does any one knows about speed benchmarks of lua5.3 vs Lua5.4?
I really hoped that Luasockets, and Lua Filesystem could one day be part of the Standard Library like in other languages.. I understand their desire for Embedded market,
But at least provide a sane option so that anyone could compile that into the Lua vm, it would be awesome

[Royi]

Does it have performance parity with LuaJIT?

[JustinTurdeau]

Does any one knows about speed benchmarks of lua5.3 vs Lua5.4?

The interpreter loop uses computed goto for dispatch now (if the compiler supports it), which seemed to be a noticeable improvement last time I checked.

I really hoped that Luasockets, and Lua Filesystem could one day be part of the Standard Library

The limit imposed on the core language has always been to stick to what can be implemented in standard C89, with the one exception being dynamic module loading. Neither of those 2 libraries can be done in pure C89, so it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

But at least provide a sane option so that anyone could compile that into the Lua vm, it would be awesome

There's nothing stopping you from doing this yourself or using a "batteries included" distribution. Why should the developers make their language more burdensome for it's intended use case just because you want some minor convenience?

[cbxbiker61]

Which changes in 5.{1,2,3} have been hard to manage?

Here's a partial list of packages that are still dependent on Lua 5.1:
Subversion
MegaGlest
X-Moto
Mpv
WireShark
NMap

If you want to port them, I'd certainly be happy to see the patches.

[tuxd3v]

The interpreter loop uses computed goto for dispatch now (if the compiler supports it), which seemed to be a noticeable improvement last time I checked.

I found some performance tests,
I just don't remember were now,
And it was not on the final release version of 5.4, it was iirc on a release candidate( ...it should be the same, since Lua 5.4 hasn't changed much from that point on.. )

There's nothing stopping you from doing this yourself or using a "batteries included" distribution. Why should the developers make their language more burdensome for it's intended use case just because you want some minor convenience?

I understand the low resources/KISS concept( and I like it.. )

For desktop usage,
It would be nice to have a more complete programming language, as a base..

Yes I know,
Those libraries are even available, separately in major distributions, so its a mater of install them..but they are separated from the Core of the language..