On 6-Jun-07, at 2:05 PM, Shoaib Meenai wrote:
> On 6/6/07, Rici Lake <lua@ricilake.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 6-Jun-07, at 1:27 PM, Shoaib Meenai wrote:
>>
>> > On 6/6/07, Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@gmx.net> wrote:
>> >> ... I believe the difference is because I made 'composite' an array
>> >> with
>> >> contiguous numerical indexes, with optimized access in Lua 5.1
>> (direct
>> >> offset computing), while in the previous code, Lua probably has to
>> >> make
>> >> more complex tests (hashing the index?) to see if the slot is empty
>> >> ...
>> >
>> > Might be a stupid question, but would the optimization apply even if
>> > the first index was, say, 1296?
>>
>> Probably not. The optimization requires (roughly) that the array uses
>> more
>> than half of the indices in the range [1, 2^k] for some integer k (and
>> applies to the indices in that range: anything outside of the range is
>> stored in the hash part of the table).
>
> But if I used, for example, indices 1296 to 65536 (which is 2^16),
> would the optimization apply? Or does k have some preset value which
> varies from system to system?
Lua chooses the largest k which satisfies the criterion (with some
limit,
which is 24 by default if I recall correctly). So that would trigger
the optimization, eventually, as the table grows in size.
