Optimizing Lua string literals to save 400 bytes

16 days ago

The authors face disk space limitations in ComputerCraft: Tweaked, where programs written in Lua exceed the 125KB floppy limit, with their repository's code exceeding 440KB.
They use compression to create self-decompressing archives for easy installation, merging data with a decompressor into a single file.
Serializing Lua data as literals is challenging, especially for tables and strings, with various representation nuances.
String serialization involves handling quoted strings with escapes and raw strings delimited by brackets, which ignore backslashes but require managing newline sequences and escape characters.
To handle raw strings containing all byte sequences, including CR, they employ a substitution technique using 'gsub' with an escape character and bitwise encoding to minimize size overhead.

Hasty Briefsbeta