----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Mensch
Date: 7/17/2013 10:31 AM
[
http://luaplus.org/#What-is-LuaPlus
-- tl;dr: "An optional high performance reference counted garbage
collector."
True story: Over the years, I've had a number of game companies
approach me about bugs in LuaRC (the Lua reference counted version
that isn't LuaPlus) and LuaPlus's reference counting. The garbage
collector running during their gameplay was unacceptable.
The simple truth is that for certain types of applications and
especially mobile applications and games, reference counting is
superior to garbage collection. The deterministic nature of the
reference counting keeps memory usage as low as possible, finalizes
resources in a predictable fashion, and prevents the need for blips
during gameplay when running garbage collection. Benchmarks of the
improved performance when garbage is being created have been posted
on the list before.
I have not had time to port the reference counting forward to Lua
5.2, but I plan on updating LuaRC against Lua 5.3.
It would be considerable awesome, however, if reference counting
could be a Lua core feature. :) :) :)
-Josh