Re: [ANNOUNCE] Lua 4.0 (alpha) now available

["Russell Y. Webb" <rw20@...>]

>I had a thinko about the fill rate of the old hash.  I thought, it would
>only rehash if no free slot was found (would have given a nearly 100% fill
>rate for numeric keys - the typical lua arrays).  But it always rehashes at
>66%.

Interesting idea.  Waiting for no free slots would be bad since that would
create _large_ collisions in some cases.  Waiting for there to be some
percentage of the entries colliding would optimize your array case and
still work well for the rest of the cases.

Meaning wait until numCollisions/numEntries = (numEntries - (numSlots -
numSlotsFree))/numEntries reached some value, say 0.3, then rehash.  That
way tables with are actually rehashed only when there are too many
collisions.  I forget how collisions are resolved in Lua tables but in some
cases that would mean that you could have tables be more than 100% full.
Of course, it probably wouldn't make that much difference and one could run
into the weird case of everything hashing to the same slot and tables
having to grow huge to satisfy the low percentage of collisions condition.

Could be fun to experiment with.

Russ