[gentoo-dev] Re: lua upgrade plan

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

William Hubbs posted on Sat, 01 Jul 2017 11:53:59 -0500 as excerpted:

> See this article for why using liblua as a shared library is not
> recommended.
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/18519
> 
> Yes, it talks about the interpretor, but it goes further and really
> discourages even making a shared library available.

PMFJI, but...

That reply is from 2005 and is apparently specific to (32-bit) x86's 
extreme shortage of general purpose registers.  Back then it made sense 
as 32-bit x86 was the dominant arch, both for gentoo, and (apparently) 
for that lua discussion (which was in the debian context).

That x86 general lack of registers was one of the big pressures behind 
the switch to amd64, before system memory sizes increased to 4GB+, and 
applies far less to today's dominant amd64, with x86 now legacy/embedded.

Now it may well be that lua performance remains register sensitive even 
with the increased number of registers available in amd64 and other 
modern archs, but quoting an 11+-year-old email written in the extremely 
register-restricted 32-bit x86 context does little to argue that point.

So... got any equivalent links to posts with more modern figures?


All that said, in FLOSS, he who volunteers, makes the rules, and 
particularly given the upstream opposition meaning more gentoo-level work 
required, if there's nobody willing to support lua in gentoo with dynamic 
linking...

... people unable or unwilling to volunteer to support their preferred 
alternative get to live with one they don't like, whether that be 
accepting what their existing distro provides even if it's not optimal, 
switching to another, or supporting their own patches or builds apart 
from gentoo.

At least gentoo makes the latter case relatively easy compared to some 
distros.  I did it with kde twice, when gentoo/kde wasn't supporting 
builds without semantic-desktop. =:^)

And in this case it appears there's even someone already doing it and 
making their work public via the lua overlay. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman