Announcement of Lua Power Patch: Interpreter Bailout Flag

["Mark T. Tomczak" <mtomczak@...>]

Greetings and hello!

My name is Mark Tomczak; I was one of the three developers from Sim Ops 
Studios (http://simopsstudios.com) who came to the Lua conference in DC 
this year. It was really great to meet so many of you and to have the 
opportunity to trade ideas and techniques!

During our talk on the WildPockets game engine, it was requested that we 
share the tweak we made to provide a "bailout" behavior to the 
interpreter: when a flag is set on the lua state, our VM handles every 
opcode as if it was a "return" operation, forcing our interpreter back 
to the topmost layer as quickly as possible. This allows us to guard 
against non-terminating scripts so that we can safely disassemble the 
script thread without simply killing it. We've bundled up those changes 
and provided them as a Lua Power Patch on the lua-users wiki; you can 
retrieve the information regarding the patch from the wiki page at 
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaPowerPatches

(Incidentally, this is the first time I've used diff and patch in a long 
time; if the patch is mis-configured, please let me know and I'll try to 
fix it).

I imagine our solution is pretty special-case, so I don't know if anyone 
else will find this hack useful. But if you do, that's wonderful and I'd 
love to know about it!

As a reminder: as Aaron mentioned in our talk, we'll be opening up a 
closed beta of our development environment on Windows in the middle of 
September. Our system will provide a convenient and straightforward 
environment for development of 3D games embedded in a web browser. If 
you are interested in 3D game development and would like to be involved 
in our beta, please feel free to e-mail me for an invitation.

Thank you again to all the presenters at the conference!

Sincerely,
Mark T. Tomczak
Sim Ops Studios, Pittsburgh, PA