Hello MTA community,
for quite a while I have been thinking about the Lua language. I think that we can all agree on this fact: that the Lua language is simple and beautiful, especially inside MTA San Andreas. Would any of you be interested in a service that lets you compile Lua directly into machine code, for example into a stand-alone PE executable file? I am not talking about srlua or LuaJIT, rather a completely new application/web service where you could queue your Lua code for compilation. There are major benefits to compiling to machine code rather than Lua bytecode. When I'd finish this project then I would implement a C++ interface and port it into MTA aswell.
Benefits of machine code translation
Speed boosts during script execution due to native format of the code
Code cannot be reversed into Lua anymore
Lua code optimizations that the reference Lua compiler does not perform (constant optimizations, function inlining, computation node grouping, loop unrolling, etc)
The ability to market your programs
I am thinking about a future business partnership with the MTA team where electronically-signed machine code translated from Lua would be securely run on MTA clients. The modernization of the Lua component would bring more freedom in designing the future scripting possibilities too.
If you guys voice enough interest for this product then I would be greatly encouraged to create it. There is no such product available yet and it's creation would be both interesting and challenging. What do you think, community member?
- Martin