Re: New array type? (was: 'table' as fallback for tables)

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 01.07.2016 um 09:26 schröbte steve donovan:
> On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@gmx.net> wrote:
> > Why does it have to be in the standard library? You can write reasonable
> > array implementations in Lua right now. Why does no one do it? I think for
> > the following reasons:
>
> I'll add another reason - they're going  to be slower, since it needs
> to call out to C and not just use VM opcodes.

Are you sure? At least some of the array implementations I can think of 
don't need `__index`, so read access would be as fast as with regular 
tables. `__len` might even be faster for larger arrays if you store the 
length somewhere. You do need `__newindex` if you want to have 
auto-resizing for your arrays, but since this could trigger a table 
reallocation I'm not sure how much that will actually matter ...

And I haven't even profiled VM opcodes vs. C calls yet.

Philipp