Cost of String Comparisons??

[sohyl siddiqui <sohyl_s@...>]

hi ppl,

We are using LUA for Game scripting in our engine. In the scripts we make heavy (about 50 - 70, every frame) use of string comparisons. The scripts are taking quite a bit of the processor, so we wanted to optimize them. My fellow developer suggested that maybe we should change all the string comparisons to number (integer) comparisons. But I had read on this list that in lua string comparisons are very cheap, since actually it is just a pointer comparison.

Just wanted to confirm this. In the scripts we make comparisons such as this:

 

if BOTA_STATE == "ATTACK" then

    --blah blah

elseif BOTA_STATE == ""RUN" then

    --blah blah

etc etc.....

 

I am not very keen on changing the string comparison to integer comparisons since that will mean a lot of work for me that I do not have time for atleast for now. so what do you ppl suggest, should I change or if the performance hit of string comparisons is not that much I could just leave it for another time ?

 

Thanking in advance,

Sohyl.

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