Codegen Lua 5.1 friendly string literals

[euclidianAce]

This gets the job done, but is arguably inelegant. gsubing a large string literal a few times will probably have some performance implications and feels hackish. And they get run for every string literal whether it has escapes or not. I think a better solution might be to handle escapes at lex time and stash a list of byte offsets in the Token for easier translation at codegen time. So consider this a functional first draft/mvp.

[github-actions]

Teal Playground URL: https://762--teal-playground-preview.netlify.app

[euclidianAce]

Ha, funnily enough that 5.1 test failure is what this is trying to solve.

[hishamhm]

Nice!

gsubing a large string literal a few times will probably have some performance implications and feels hackish. And they get run for every string literal whether it has escapes or not.

I've added a check here: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/tree/euclidianAce-string-codegen-check

I think a better solution might be to handle escapes at lex time and stash a list of byte offsets in the Token for easier translation at codegen time.

I've also tried my hand implementing your suggestion, based on your code: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/tree/euclidianAce-string-codegen-escapes

I did some light benchmarking with hyperfine and I couldn't see clear performance differences (the variation caused by CPU throttling in my laptop was greater than the difference across branches).

What do think about these variations?

[euclidianAce]

If there isn't a blatant performance degradation then this is probably fine to merge (barring any gen_compat checks that should be added).

[hishamhm]

Merged!