Several small improvements (code style, warnings, comments, more tests),
in particular:
- 'lua_topointer' extended to handle strings
- raises an error in 'string.format("%10q")' ('%q' with modifiers)
- in the manual for 'string.format', the term "option" replaced by
"conversion specifier" (the term used by the C standard)
To-be-closed variables must contain objects with '__toclose'
metamethods (or nil). Functions were removed for several reasons:
* Functions interact badly with sandboxes. If a sandbox raises
an error to interrupt a script, a to-be-closed function still
can hijack control and continue running arbitrary sandboxed code.
* Functions interact badly with coroutines. If a coroutine yields
and is never resumed again, its to-be-closed functions will never
run. To-be-closed objects, on the other hand, will still be closed,
provided they have appropriate finalizers.
* If you really need a function, it is easy to create a dummy
object to run that function in its '__toclose' metamethod.
This comit also adds closing of variables in case of panic.
New functions to reset/kill a thread/coroutine, mainly (only?) to
close any pending to-be-closed variable. ('lua_resetthread' also
allows a thread to be reused...)
It is an error for a to-be-closed variable to have a non-closable
non-nil value when it is being closed. This situation does not seem to
be useful and often hints to an error. (Particularly in the C API, it is
easy to change a to-be-closed index by mistake.)
The mechanism of "caching the last closure created for a prototype to
try to reuse it the next time a closure for that prototype is created"
was removed. There are several reasons:
- It is hard to find a natural example where this cache has a measurable
impact on performance.
- Programmers already perceive closure creation as something slow,
so they tend to avoid it inside hot paths. (Any case where the cache
could reuse a closure can be rewritten predefining the closure in some
variable and using that variable.)
- The implementation was somewhat complex, due to a bad interaction
with the generational collector. (Typically, new closures are new,
while prototypes are old. So, the cache breaks the invariant that
old objects should not point to new ones.)
A closing method cannot be called in its own stack slot, as there may
be returning values in the stack after that slot, and the call would
corrupt those values. Instead, the closing method must be copied to the
top of the stack to be called.
Moreover, even when a function returns no value, its return istruction
still has to have its position (which will set the stack top) after
the local variables, otherwise a closing method might corrupt another
not-yet-called closing method.
values, so that the array can use bytes instead of ints, reducing
its size. (A new array 'abslineinfo' is used when line differences
do not fit in a byte.)