Random thought: lazy interning
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- Subject: Random thought: lazy interning
- From: Rici Lake <lua@...>
- Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 23:46:52 -0500
Suppose that I have an immutable userdata type which I would like to be
able to intern, but which I don't always want to intern. Something like
bignums, perhaps: I'd like to intern them for efficiency, but I don't
want to intern intermediate results which are going to disappear right
away. In particular, if I'm going to use the objects as table keys, I
really need to intern them so that the table lookup will work.
What would be necessary for Lua to help me do this? It occurs to me
that it wouldn't require much. If I'm willing to handle the interning,
in some manner (perhaps by constructing a canonical representation as a
Lua string), then I only need to be "informed" when Lua is about to use
the userdata as a table key. (I could handle equality myself in an __eq
metamethod, possibly by interning both comparands and then doing object
equality.)
For example: the settable operation currently calls the table's
__newindex metamethod if the key is not present. But it could also call
the *key*'s __newkey metamethod (if the key were a userdata and had a
metatable with __newkey....)
So the settable loop might look something like:
function set(table, key, value)
if rawget(table, key) ~= nil then
return rawset(table, key, value)
elseif type(key) == "userdata" then
local func = getmeta(key, "__newkey")
if func then
local newkey = func(key)
if newkey ~= key then
if rawget(table, newkey) then
return rawset(table, newkey, value)
end
key = newkey
end
end
-- Now continue with the current algorithm:
return internedset(table, key, value)
end
where internedset is the current algorithm:
function internedset(table, key, value)
local meta = getmeta(table, "__newindex")
if meta == nil then
return rawset(table, key, value)
elseif type(meta) == "table" then
return internedset(meta, key, value)
else
return meta(table, key, value)
end
end
---
I don't think this is much overhead. Is there anyone other than me who
thinks it might be useful?
R.