NInikki93·Sep 10, 2020
Yeah, I definitely care about performance more in that tradeoff. In my experience when performance matters, these details about using such a null representation and what different representations lend themselves also tends to matter. vs. gluing libraries to libraries willy-nilly. At that point this null issue is far from the main thing that comes up bc. you care about data layout enough that you have control over that representation.
One example I'm running into in practice these days is--I'm using chipmunk2d game physics engine in a library. It does heap allocations, while all the component data for other stuff in my game tends go be well managed into pools that I can walk through contiguously. Even if I use a custom allocator for it, it uses pointers to refer between objects internally so I can't "move" instances of its eg. `cpBody` obj
Read the rest
ect around in memory. Would've been so nice to just own its data and let the library be layout-agnostic but alas.
But yeah those are the data-data glues I've been interested in--libraries that kind of own representation but not location I guess.
For your particular issue though, I think it really is bc. Lua is a language that out of the box doesn't tend to own representation, to the point of not eg. having its own class system etc, and it mostly shines when used in ways that play into that strength (eg. you want to wrap your own object ontology for ppl to script). The best libraries for Lua have tended to the invent their own representation and expect you to care about and own the mappings between libraries. esp. for JSON, the impedance mismatch with Lua tables puts it in this weird uncanny valley.
Tbh my fav method of using JSON is to not have an in memory document format at all and just treat it as reader / writer objects directly into domain data so that you don't keep paying this intermediatw representation conversion cost. eg. https://github.com/beached/daw_json_link is interesting here In my own game stuff I just have game components accept reader/writer objects to read from / write to and each component tends to have domain logic about what it means to be missing something, what some defaults are, etc.