[luatex] LuaTeX precompilation

[Andreas Matthias]

Henrik Mannerström wrote:

> How hard would it be to make a luatex compatible precompiled format? One that basically serialises the whole luatex state to a file and could re-use
> it? Would it speed up the compilation of short documents? Is there any plans or projects related to this?


There's a project on Github called Eris that claims that it can
dump and undump the Lua state.

https://github.com/fnuecke/eris

Unfortunately this project seems to be discontinued. It was written
for Lua 5.2 and doesn't work with Lua 5.3 which is currently used in luatex.

The main code for dumping the Lua state is in file "eris.c". It's non-trivial
and it's presumably a lot of work to keep up with each new Lua release.
But it might be worth looking into it, even if just to understand how much
work it really is.

Andreas