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Lua Tables - The Swiss Army Knife of Data Structures (slicker.me)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 5 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Experience has shown that having a map as your only data structure is definitely a mistake. It's much better to support real arrays too. I doubt it would have made the implementation significantly more complex either (maybe even simpler for luajit).

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    Idk, PHP chugs on splendidly with arrays that combine both arrays and maps. I regret to say that PHP is considerably faster than some better languages like Python and Ruby, and arrays are the workhorse structure there.

    (Like, PHP's approach to FastCGI is that the script's runtime is destroyed after every request and then started anew for the next one, and it still outperforms Python's always-on approach. Of mainstream languages, only Node can compete.)

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Right but it's fast(ish) in spite of that. It would still be better with separate types.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Weird choice of lifestyle to complain about the two fastest scripting languages being ‘fast-ish’. While you complain, the world is using Lua for embedded scripts and game programming, and PHP for the web.

    People straight up write libraries in Lua instead of C, because the performance difference is unnoticeable. But apparently it's only ‘fastish’.

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