As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to implement things that require bitwise manipulation.
The addition of a built-in bitwise library would make concepts such as bit fields, bit packing, compression, hashing, and encryption much more feasible for developers to implement.
Lua BitOp is an example of a pre-existing Lua binding that does what I’m looking for.
I can support this; it’s currently a right pain to implement this manually, and it’s useful for so many things, such as (as listed by Fractality) hashing, encryption, and compression.
I think it would be awesome if we could have the bitwise operators from lua 5.3.
Has anyone tried using bitwise libraries in Roblox? How did that go?
@Maelstronomer, did you do this for your accelerator project?
I used a bitwise library I found on the internet to do some simplex noise a while back. This was before the built-in noise function was a thing. It would have been faster and more memory efficient had there been built in operators.
The catch of 5.3’s bitwise ops is that they depend on the abomination that is the integer subtype.
Built-in operators with BitOp’s elegant semantics would be convenient, albeit overkill. For all intents and purposes, a library is fine.
There’s no built-in simplex noise generator, so this remains a good use case.
Bits can be represented as tables (e.g. {0,0,1,1,0,1,0,1} or {true,false,false,true,false}) which makes working with it quite easy. But like Nimblz mentioned, it’s not very (memory/time) efficient.
O(n) shifts? oh god
I agree with this. I have a simplex based terrain generator that would greatly benefit from native bitwise operators.
I also ported Luaforge user hanzhao’s bitwise operators into a ModuleScript a couple of years ago. I have no idea how good it is, but it works (if anyone is in desperate need of them now).
Still would be waaaay better to have native support.
I think the addition of the already included-into lua bit32 sub-section would be a useful addition to the Roblox developer community.