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I'm dabbling in Love2D using Lua and have just implemented a StateMachine to handle transitions between a set of states e.g. IntroState, MenuState, PlayState etc..

In previous programs I usally release objects and/or states that are only a "one-time-deal", iow will only be presented to the player once during the lifetime of the application. In C++ I use the sizeof operator which returns the size in bytes of the passed object, just to get some feedback of how much memory I release at a certain point.

Are there any corresponding keyword or trick in Lua to achieve this?

SvinSimpe
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    There's [getsize](https://github.com/siffiejoe/lua-getsize), an external module that can do that. It's for PUC-Rio Lua only (no LuaJIT), because it accesses internal data structures. However, Lua will hold on to the memory of the objects until they are unreachable *and* the garbage collector reclaims them, and that could be much later, so such feedback doesn't make much sense in Lua. – siffiejoe Oct 14 '15 at 11:43

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If you need fine-grained information, you can use getsize as @siffiejoe mentioned in combination with some table traversal to get to all local and global objects. If you need more coarse-grained approach, you can use collectgarbage('count') to get the total memory used by Lua.

This SO answer and this lua discussion on memory tracking may be of some help. Note that you don't have control over memory release as it's handled by the garbage collector (although there are several GC settings you can tweak).

Community
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Paul Kulchenko
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