Efficient LUA code?

[shiin]

Since I am currently refactoring my old addons, I was wondering wether there are some guides out there on how to write efficient LUA code (i.e. the basic do and don'ts).

[Zyonin]

I don't know about guides to efficient Lua code, however if you have an IRC client (they are easy to find and you may have one without even knowing it), then go over to:

irc.freenode.net

and join the channel:

#wowace

Then you can talk code with the various crazies over at WoWAce. Otherwise find some good examples of efficient code (Tekkub's mods are a good example, then again I am just a novice coder myself), take em apart and see how the author has put it together.

Another IRC channel is:

irc://irc.freenode.net/WoWUIDev

[Eggi]

Don't focus on efficiency as it is absolutley not important if your addon uses a few kb more memory or a little bit more processor time. It is much more important that you write clean code.
Only if some parts of your addon are called very often (e.g. OnUpdate) you should try to avoid doing unnecessary things there.

[Torhal]

Originally Posted by Eggi Don't focus on efficiency... It is much more important that you write clean code.

In many cases, the two are mutually exclusive.

[Slakah]

Heres a couple of links:

http://lua-users.org/wiki/OptimisationCodingTips
www.lua.org/gems/sample.pdf

The main sources of performance issues I've noticed are lack of table reuse, another way to help is to make your Options only load into memory when needed.

[Zergreth]

I disagree with you, Eggi. Efficiency is one of the most important things to me. If everybody would code addons the way you say it, without looking at efficiency, then that would probably mutate into some large pile of badly used memory and processing time. I have to agree with Torhal's post, too. If you want clean code, you can as well go for efficiency, since efficient code is usually clean.

[Tekkub]

Efficiency and clean code go hand in hand. You can write "beautiful" code that runs like ****, or amazingly fast code that is impossible to read. The real skill is doing both :P