The Implementation of Lua 5.0

Roberto Ierusalimschy (Department of Computer Science, PUC-Rio, Brazil)

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo (IMPA-Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada, Brazil)

Waldemar Celes (Department of Computer Science, PUC-Rio, Brazil)

Abstract: We discuss the main novelties of the implementation of Lua 5.0: its register-based virtual machine, the new algorithm for optimizing tables used as arrays, the implementation of closures, and the addition of coroutines.

Keywords: closures, compilers, coroutines, hash tables, virtual machines

Categories: D.3.2, D.3.3, D.3.4, E.2