Re: gc and module loading

[Hans van der Meer <H.vanderMeer@...>]

In my previous mail to the list I posed questions about having a  
segmentation fault on using dynamically loaded modules:

> My question: can anyone more versed in the internals of Lua tell me if
> this could indeed be the case?
> Is there a solution or must I absolutely refrain from calling other
> modules during the gc cleanup phase?

Some further research revealed more cases where faults arise. As far  
as I can see my tests indeed seem to point at premature removal of my  
userdata items (from my point of view, of course) by the garbage  
collector.

The cause could be that the userdata were made in C-code with  
lua_newuserdata. I have a doubly linked list of these that got garbage- 
collected while an operation on the list was still running. Although  
the holder of the chain resides in lua-code, the chain is held  
entirely by C-pointers therein: no special significance for Lua, I am  
afraid. It might well be possible that the memory system doesn't know  
enough about my data structures to be able to keep them as long as  
needed.

Therefore I think I can narrow the problem to the following question:  
if I allocate userdata with lua_newuserdata and keep them through C- 
pointers only, how do I let the Lua-system know when to collect and  
when not?

Thanks in advance
Hans van der Meer