Re: [ANN] Lunatik -- NetBSD kernel scripting with Lua (GSoC project results)

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:45:41 -0600
Samuel Greear <lua%evilcode.net@localhost> wrote:

> I didn't like the fact that the only option for loading a script into
> the kernel was to load the script source. I would make loading
> pre-compiled scripts the preferential method. In fact, I would
> probably tear eval out of the kernel lua implementation and only
> support loading of precompiled byte-code into the kernel.

If the tokenizer is considered heavy, or a potential source of exploit,
or if scripts are expected to frequently be loaded and a peformance
bottleneck exists, I also think that loading pre-tokenized bytecode
would be a good idea.

However, there are several things to consider: some systems (i.e. Java)
do important sanity checks at tokenization time.  Is this important for
Lua?

Secondly, is the Lua bytecode using a stable, well defined instruction
set which is unlikely to change?  Otherwise as it improves and gets
updated any pre-tokenized scripts might need to be regenerated.  Of
course, that's probably not an issue if everything is part of the base
system and always get rebuilt together.

Thanks,
-- 
Matt