loadstring

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Anybody know what is going on behind the scene with loadstring?
Was working with threads and trying to get a faster way to convert a string to a table.
My first approcah was:

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function extractPoints( stringData )	 -- string =>  point table{x,y,z}
	local temp = stringData:split() -- p1x,p1y,p1z,... => temp{p1x,p1y,p1z, ... }
	local reconstructedTable = {}
	local field	= 1
	for i = 1, #temp, 3 do		-- temp{p1x,p1y,p1z, ... } => table{{p1x,p1y,p1z},{p2x,p2y,p2z}, ... }
		reconstructedTable[ field ] = { temp[i], temp[i+1], temp[i+2] }
		field = field + 1
		end
	return reconstructedTable
	end

function string:split( sep ) -- parces string 'x,y,z' into x y z - default separator == comma
		local sep, fields	= sep or ",", {}
		local pattern	= string.format( "([^%s]+)", sep )
		self:gsub(pattern, function(c) fields[#fields+1] = c end)
		return fields
		end

That seemed just too complex to be efficient so I tried:

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function string2table( string )
	assert( loadstring( string ))()
	end

Both worked (slightly different string formating) but the loadstring approach was ~20% slower than my first approach.
Any ideas why?