seleb / pico-8-token-optimizations Goto Github PK

Either my knowledge how formal automatons and parsers/lexers work or lot of these optimizations are worse than unoptimized versions? For instance:

var1,var2 = value1,value2 vs

var1 = value1
var2 = value2

First, optimized version, has 4(n-1)+3 tokens (var1, comma, value1, comma; var2, value2; equals) while unoptimized, since newlines do not count as tokens, has only 3n tokens? In two line example optimized version is 7 tokens (4*1 + 3) and unoptimized is 6 tokens?

Vector Dimensions as Properties Instead of Array Elements a lot of mistakes, for instance it's not 9 but 11 tokens to create point={x=x,y=y} (point, equals, left curly, x, equals, x, comma, y, equals, y, right curly). point[1] is 4 tokens and point.x is three tokens as well...

Also string literals should be parsed as three tokens, not 1 as it is implied... "foo" should be double quote, string literal, double quote. Even if literal part is not somehow a token, that is still two tokens per string literal. Which can make repeating strings way more tokens than declaring it as constant (for Replace Constant Variables with Literals) and Calling Functions with Strings or Tables which makes only sense if your argument is string literal, otherwise you lose tokens: foo"hello" is 4 tokens and foo("hello") is 6 tokens but converting number never makes sense because foo"6" should be the same as foo(6) and you lose tokens in int->string conversion. Now, lua can be parsing string as one token internally during token stream creation so this point might be moot and subsequent points as well.

Replace Table Elements with Separate Variables section has bad token reduction. player.x vs player_x is two tokens down (dot is another token) so gains there could be very high especially with nested tables. So it's 2 tokens instead of 1. Replace Multiple Table Accesses with Local Variables same issue, it's n-2 not n-1 and to create it's 3+n.

Prefer Property Access to Array Indexing makes wrong assumption about string being one token so it saves more tokens than declared.