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67 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
67 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
# table.clone
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**Status**: Implemented
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## Summary
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Add `table.clone` function that, given a table, produces a copy of that table with the same keys/values/metatable.
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## Motivation
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There are multiple cases today when cloning tables is a useful operation.
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- When working with tables as data containers, some algorithms may require modifying the table that can't be done in place for some reason.
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- When working with tables as objects, it can be useful to obtain an identical copy of the object for further modification, preserving the metatable.
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- When working with immutable data structures, any modification needs to clone some parts of the data structure to produce a new version of the object.
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While it's possible to implement this function in user code today, it's impossible to implement it with maximum efficiency; furthermore, cloning is a reasonably fundamental
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operation so from the ergonomics perspective it can be expected to be provided by the standard library.
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## Design
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`table.clone(t)` takes a table, `t`, and returns a new table that:
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- has the same metatable
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- has the same keys and values
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- is not frozen, even if `t` was
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The copy is shallow: implementing a deep recursive copy automatically is challenging (for similar reasons why we decided to avoid this in `table.freeze`), and often only certain keys need to be cloned recursively which can be done after the initial clone.
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The table can be modified after cloning; as such, functions that compute a slightly modified copy of the table can be easily built on top of `table.clone`.
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`table.clone(t)` is functionally equivalent to the following code, but it's more ergonomic (on the account of being built-in) and significantly faster:
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```lua
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assert(type(t) == "table")
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local nt = {}
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for k,v in pairs(t) do
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nt[k] = v
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end
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if type(getmetatable(t)) == "table" then
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setmetatable(nt, getmetatable(t))
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end
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```
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The reason why `table.clone` can be dramatically more efficient is that it can directly copy the internal structure, preserving capacity and exact key order, and is thus
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limited purely by memory bandwidth. In comparison, the code above can't predict the table size ahead of time, has to recreate the internal table structure one key at a time,
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and bears the interpreter overhead (which can be avoided for numeric keys with `table.move` but that doesn't work for the general case of dictionaries).
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Out of the abundance of caution, `table.clone` will fail to clone the table if it has a protected metatable. This is motivated by the fact that you can't do this today, so
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there are no new potential vectors to escape various sandboxes. Superficially it seems like it's probably reasonable to allow cloning tables with protected metatables, but
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there may be cases where code manufactures tables with unique protected metatables expecting 1-1 relationship and cloning would break that, so for now this RFC proposes a more
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conservative route. We are likely to relax this restriction in the future.
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## Drawbacks
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Adding a new function to `table` library theoretically increases complexity. In practice though, we already effectively implement `table.clone` internally for some VM optimizations, so exposing this to the users bears no cost.
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Assigning a type to this function is a little difficult if we want to enforce the "argument must be a table" constraint. It's likely that we'll need to type this as `table.clone(T): T` for the time being, which is less precise.
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## Alternatives
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We can implement something similar to `Object.assign` from JavaScript instead, that simultaneously assigns extra keys. However, this won't be fundamentally more efficient than
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assigning the keys afterwards, and can be implemented in user space. Additionally, we can later extend `clone` with an extra argument if we so choose, so this proposal is the
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minimal viable one.
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We can immediately remove the rule wrt protected metatables, as it's not clear that it's actually problematic to be able to clone tables with protected metatables.
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