Some userdata objects may need to support manual destruction in addition
to automatic GC. For example, files, threads, GPU resources and objects
with large external allocations.
With Lua, a finalizer can be _generically_ called by invoking the __gc
metamethod manually, but this is currently not possible with tagged
userdata in Luau because it's not possible to query the destructor
associated with an userdata. While it is possible to workaround this by
duplicating the destructor table locally on client side (*), it's more
convenient to deduplicate the data and get the destructor using the API
instead.
(*) Note: a separate destructor table for each VM may be required if the
VMs use different set of tags.
Implementation notes:
1. I first considered adding a typedef for lua_Destructor but
unfortunately there are two kinds of destructors, one with and one
without the lua_State* argument, so I decided against it at this point.
Maybe it should be added later if the destructor API is unified (by
dropping the Lua state pointer argument?).
2. For some reason the conformance test produced warning "qualifier
applied to function type has no meaning; ignored" on VS2017 (possibly
because the test framework does not like function pointers for some
reason?). I silenced this by pulling out the test expressions from those
CHECKs.
- TableOperations lint now includes a warning for table.create(N, {}) (which is likely a mistake since the table is shared by all entries)
- Type checker now type checks #v when v is a union
- Parser now rejects sources that consists of a single unfinished long comment
- Work around significant MSVC 2022 performance regression, bringing it more or less in line with MSVC 2019
- Compiler now predicts array size for newly allocated tables when the table is filled in a short loop
- Small improvements in compilation throughput (~2% faster)
- Implement paged sweeper for GC which improves sweep throughput 2-3x and reduces memory consumption by 8 bytes per object (once it is stabilized we will see additional 8 bytes per object of savings)
- Improve Repl Tab completion
- Repl now supports -i (interactive mode to run code in context of a script's environment) and -On (to control optimization flags)
This doesn't contain all changes for 507 yet but we might want to do the
Luau 0.507 release a bit earlier to end the year sooner.
Changes:
- Type ascription (::) now permits casts between related types in both directions, allowing to refine or loosen the type (RFC #56)
- Fix type definition for tonumber to return number? since the input string isn't guaranteed to contain a valid number
- Fix type refinements for field access via []
- Many stability fixes for type checker
- Provide extra information in error messages for type mismatches in more cases
- Improve performance of type checking for large unions when union members are string literals
- Add coverage reporting support to Repl (--coverage command line argument) and lua_getcoverage C API
- Work around code signing issues during Makefile builds on macOS
- Improve performance of truthiness checks in some cases, particularly on Apple M1, resulting in 10-25% perf gains on qsort benchmark depending on the CPU/compiler
- Fix support for little-endian systems; IBM s390x here we go!
Petri Häkkinen