Books Programmers Don't Really Read

Re:Books Programmers Don't Really Read by Zak on Tuesday April 27, 2010 @07:11AM (#1297832)

I think a lot of dynamic language implementations suck because their authors haven't bothered to study Lisp implementations. The widely used implementations of Common Lisp and Scheme don't suck at all[0]. Of course, some implementors of other dynamic languages do seem to have studied Lisp implementations and it shows in the results. Lua doesn't suck at all.

[0] Ok, the multi-platform support of some of the CL implementations could be better.

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Re:Books Programmers Don't Really Read by riffraff on Tuesday April 27, 2010 @08:48AM (#1298024)

I'd say they suck because the authors cared about specific issues other than making the implementation not suck (which I guess means fast performance performance?).

But how does lua bears lisp inheritance in its implementation? IIRC lua does not use pointer tagging which is a typical lispism, uses tables for everything, has no lists, and uses a different approach for implementing closures.

Are you thinking of LuaJIT(2) ?

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Re:Books Programmers Don't Really Read by silentbicycle on Tuesday April 27, 2010 @01:08PM (#1298860)

Lua's designers have acknowledged a lot of Scheme influence, especially from 4.0 onward, but I think it's more about the semantics than the implementation.

Lua uses a type tag + union rather than tagged pointers because it's not strictly portable, and they've placed a high priority on strict ANSI C compliance (with the sole exception of dynamic library loading). Also, Lua tables recognize when they're being used as arrays and use an array internally.

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