5 ms·

Strings are interned in Lua which means identical strings have the same reference.

• StavrosK 13y ago
  That's interesting... Would interning change the speed at which strings are generated, then?
  • daurnimator 13y ago
    Yes, strings are hashed at creation time. This means strings can never be modified => a new one is created. The down side is that string modification (including appending) in a loop is expensive.
    • russellsprouts 13y ago
      Of course, languages like Java have StringBuffer objects. In Lua, if you are generating a string, and you know that it will need a lot of concatenations, you can use something like this: local string_buffer = {} while condition() do table.insert(string_buffer, getString()) end local string = table.concat(string_buffer)