Lua shared between processes

[George Sealy <george@...>]

Hi all,

I've been experimenting with Lua for work, and have found it to be just 
the tool I was looking for.  However, I have a problem that I was hoping 
someone may be able to help me with.

I need to have multiple processes running on a single machine (Win32), 
all with access to a single instance of a "world state", which I want to 
describe with Lua.  My initial solution was to use shared memory in a 
dll, which would allow all processes to access the single set of data.  
However, when I use lua_open to create a new state, I can't see a way to 
make that pointer be in shared memory...  Initially I thought I could 
create a copy of the Lua state variable, but that'll fall over 
internally whenever Lua needs more memory.

The only other option I can think of is some form of communication 
between processes, such as TCP/IP or memory mapping, but the world state 
needs to be accessed many (hundreds or even thousands of) times a 
second, so performance is an issue.

If anyone has any advice, I'd really appreciate it.  I'd rather avoid 
rewriting the entire language's memory allocation if I can help it!

Thanks,

George Sealy

--
George Sealy, PhD                       email : george@arl.co.nz
Software Developer / Architect          phone : +64 3 477 2995
Animation Research Ltd