1.2 KiB
Support bitwise operators
Summary
Add bitwise operators and metamethods for bitwise operators
Motivation
Luau currently implements the bit32 library which adds support for 32 bit numbers. Supporting bitwise operators would add support for all numbers providing a plethora of benefits.
bit32.x() syntax can be complex to write and confuse users with many bit operations. Implementing bitwise operators would also improve performance compared to calling bit32 functions and metamethod overhead would be less than doing bit32.x(),
Implementing bitwise operators simplifies the learning complexity of learning the bitwise library due to the syntax being universal to most languages.
Design
x & y __band
x | y __bor
x ^^ y or x ~ y __bxor
~x __bnot
x << y __blshift
x >> y __brshift
Bxor support is odd because Lua 5.3 added the operation as x ~ y and a Lua patch by Thierry Grellier and Joshua Simmons added it as x ^^ y
Drawbacks
Adding bitwise operators would add several new operations to the interpreter and would require new metamethods to be added. Increased compiler complexity.
Alternatives
Implementing a bit library that would support all numbers