SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

[There really ought to be a code archives for this kind of post. hint, hint]

This tip is for BMaxNG and the zeke Luajit module, both maintained by Brucey.

Lua doesn't have any builtin Sign() function and handling the function inside lua was killing the performance of my script. 
The solution was to expose a function from Bmax to lua using the FFI.


1) Create a C file and inside put your function


__declspec(dllexport) double c_sign(double x)
{
   return (x>0.0)-(x<0.0);   
}

Notice the dllexport part. this tells gcc that the function is exposed at the same level as the C standard library.
2) In your Bmax project you'll want to create a reference to the function like normal:

import "my_c_functions.c"
extern
   function c_sign:double(x:double)
endextern



3) Then in Lua, You need to declare the format of the function like:

local ffi = require("ffi")

ffi.cdef[[
double c_sign(double x);
]]
function sign(x)
   return ffi.C.c_sign(x)
end

Now you can use the sign function in lua that's not slow as hell.
This same method can be used in Vanilla Bmax, but there may be some extra steps because bcc mangles the name. you can look at the top of the generated assembly file to view the new name. It's been many years since I did it, so I don't recall all of the steps for classic BMax.

Quote[There really ought to be a code archives for this kind of post. hint, hint]

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