On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 03:55:54AM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 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?
 
That link actually came from our current lua ebuilds. The shared library
is offered, but the comments in the ebuild basically say the same thing
and cite that link. Also, x86 is still a stable supported arch in
Gentoo.

> 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...
 
You are correct. Basically we have to write our own build system and
keep it up to date for every version of lua in order to support this. If
someone can convince upstream to support it, this would be far better for
everyone.

> ... 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. =:^)

The plan is to migrate what can be migrated from there to the
tree once everything is up to date.

William

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