Re: Thought experiment: what would you remove from Lua

[Phil Leblanc <philanc@...>]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 4:04 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Dibyendu Majumdar once stated:
>> On 1 August 2018 at 19:46, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 2018-08-01 19:57 GMT+02:00 Phil Leblanc <philanc@gmail.com>:
>> >> Thought experiment level 2:
>> >>
>> >> -- Remove metatables
>> >>
>> >> i.e. less "object-oriented" things. Going more with plain functions,
>> >> tables of functions and closures.
>> >>
[...]
>>
Meta tables are indeed another problematic feature from optimization
>> point of view.
>
>   You *really* don't use C-based modules at all, do you?  Because without
> metatables, userdata becomes rather useless.

I wouldn't say "useless". Maybe more risky, or more inconvenient?

I think that Dibyendu's thought experiment objective is not to find
features that you can remove and get an as good and convenient
language as Lua is today.

My understanding is that the objective is to find a subset, or a
simplified dialect of Lua that could be more efficiently compiled (or
interpreted?). Such a dialect would be simpler, lower-level at some
places, maybe rougher for the developer. These would be trade-offs for
a higher execution speed (or a smaller implementation).

I find the exercise interesting :-)