brianush1/zua

zua's Issues

instruction pointer is problematic

The instruction pointer for the VM must be stored per coroutine. However, as D does not offer built-in thread-local storage, it is currently stored in a hashmap with the current Fiber being the key (Solution 1).

An alternative solution (Solution 2), if there were no coroutines in Lua, would be to store a single, global IP.

When comparing 7 runs of solutions 1 and 2, taking the best of 1 and the worst of 2 on the given benchmark.lua file, the times being 375.109 and 184.882 milliseconds respectively, solution 2 outperforms the current solution, being over 2.02 times faster.

More than half the runtime of a given program is spent accessing the instruction pointer. This is not good!

constructors with parameters are not properly wrapped

support for `alias this;` in class wrappers

add pattern-matching functions in string library

Currently, none of the functions in the string library that rely on pattern matching have been added. Here is a list of the ones that need to be added:

• find
• format
• gmatch
• gsub
• match

bytecode dump may not format strings correctly

Dumping bytecode that contains a string such as "]] a [[" will re-encode the string as [[]] a [[]], which may be problematic for readability purposes.

constructor visibility is not taken into account

encode minimum needed stack size in bytecode

Currently, the stack size is hard-coded at 16 values. This can be both a waste of space, and too little for some functions, particularly those using large tuples.

operator overloading on classes

Currently, class wrappers only allow overloading toString. This should be expanded to all operator overloads.

os.clock() always returns 0 on Windows

GetProcessTimes() from the Windows API should be used in the implementation of os.clock.

add basic semantic analysis stage

Currently, erroneous code may produce unwanted output due to the lack of a semantic analysis stage. Some examples of such code:

break -- outside of a loop

(function()
	print(...) -- outside of a variadic context
end)()

return true
print'a'

instance strings to speed up hashmap lookups and reduce bytecode size

Currently, duplicate strings are duplicated in memory, making comparisons between two strings take O(n) time. This is not ideal, as Lua uses strings in indexing very often, and may be a major bottleneck in performance-sensitive code.