RE: Parsing to byte code

["Josh Jensen" <joshj@...>]

> > Freestyle Snowboarding.  I haven't found any bugs in it, if
> > that's what you mean. 4.1 Alpha is WAY better than 4.0, and 
> > it works in a multithreaded environment.
> 
> Can you go into more detail about what makes 4.1 Alpha "WAY 
> better" than 4.0?

Lessee, some of the reasons are:

* It is faster than 4.0, at least in our tests.
* It has the ability to be multithreaded.  This is critical to
background loading processes in Amped.  There is also some trickery used
with the shared global states that showed up in 4.1 Alpha.
* The byte code for a script can be loaded and not executed
(lua_loadbuffer()).
* It can dump byte code to disk (great for save games).

Hmmm... that's all I can think of off the top of my head.  The most
annoying thing about 4.1 Alpha was the change from lua_pushuserdata() to
lua_newuserdatabox().  I couldn't figure out why the Amped frame rates
went to pot after integrating it.  It was because lua_newuserdatabox()
allocates memory for the same pointer EVERY time it is called, resulting
in many, many new allocations per frame.  The whole point was just to
pass a C pointer to Lua so a callback could be made to a C function with
that pointer.  The 4.1 Alpha behavior must have been different than
4.0's lua_pushuserdata(), because I am positive this didn't occur then.

Thanks,
Josh