Taco Hoekwater wrote: [...]
Hans and I just did some tests, and it seems that the userdata access is useful if *but only if* you are very low on memory. In other cases, it just adds extra objects to be garbage collected, which makes the collector slower. That is on top of extra time spent on the actual calls, and even worse: those extra gc objects tend to be scattered around in memory, resulting in extra minor page faults (cpu cache misses) and all that has a noticeable effect on run speed: the metatable-based access is 20-30% slower than the old massive to_table.
Interesting. As you said, much depends on how one uses / tests. I made some tests with translating fontforge font structure directly into the luatex font table without an intermediate form. This gives bests results, but obviously requires too many simplifications.
Therefore, there seems little point in expanding the metadata functionality any further. What is there will stay, but adding more metadata objects appears to be a waste of time on all sides.
OK, thank you. -- Pawe/l Jackowski P.Jackowski@gust.org.pl