If the buffer is already empty, nothing to do. If we're throwing away the
whole buffer, we can just empty it and avoid read_chunk() (which in turn
may collapse()). These shortcuts are much more efficient.
Character sequences could be split across chunk boundaries. Would require a bunch
of code to make that work reliably.
Only apply front_consumed on first chunk, and adjust buffer_pos accordingly.
Similar to util.ringbuffer (and shares almost identical API). Differences:
- size limit is optional and dynamic
- does not allocate a fixed buffer of max_size bytes
- focus on simply storing references to existing string objects where possible,
avoiding unnecessary allocations
- references are still stored in a ring buffer to enable use as a fast FIFO
Optional second parameter to new() provides the number of ring buffer segments. On
Lua 5.2 on my laptop, a segment is ~19 bytes. If the ring buffer fills up, the next
write will compact all strings into a single item.