xonovex Lua Opinionated Guidelines (Performance Tuning)
A performance overlay on lua-guide. Apply lua-guide for all Lua fundamentals: module pattern, local variables, metatables, coroutines, input validation, error handling, string building, idioms. This skill adds only hot-path tuning: the tunings especially benefit LuaJIT, and the same principles still help vanilla Lua 5.4.
Requirements
- LuaJIT 2.1 (these tunings especially target JIT compilation) or Lua ≥ 5.4 (principles still apply).
Essentials
- Foundation - All Lua fundamentals live in lua-guide; this skill adds hot-path performance tuning on top
- Simple hot loops - Iterate dense arrays with a plain numeric for-loop; don't over-engineer with unrolling or FFI, see references/jit-friendly-tables.md
- Cache lookups - Hoist repeated global/module-table lookups into locals on hot paths, see references/cache-lookups.md
Gotchas
- Apply hot-path tuning only where profiling shows a need: don't over-engineer with FFI arrays or SIMD-style tricks beyond what was asked
Progressive disclosure
- Read references/jit-friendly-tables.md - Load when optimizing hot paths or improving JIT performance
- Read references/cache-lookups.md - Load when reducing table access overhead in performance-critical code