Re: How to collect as much as possible with collectgarbage() ?

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

Dirk Feytons wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Roberto
> Ierusalimschy<roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> > > So, I'd have to take care of issuing enough collectgarbage's after
> > > reading large files or calling table.concat, right?
> > Yes, if you really need all the memory back as soon as possible.
>
> To make that a bit easier it would be nice if
> collectgarbage("collect") returned how much memory it released.
>
> On a related note, I've been wondering why collectgarbage("count")
> returns the current memory use in kilobytes instead of bytes? When
> using Lua with an integer core instead of floating point we're losing
> some precision and on an embedded platform those small bytecounts are
> significant.

I posted a note on this exact problem a few months (years?) ago. I
suspect that Lua was never intended to run on little micros, but
I am certainly happy that it does :-)

Making it display bytes now could break a lot of existing code, but
it's pretty easy to mod the code to add your own option...

Ralph