Re: External modules was Re: Ideas for implementing commercial support for Lua

["Thatcher Ulrich" <tu@...>]

On Nov 15, 2002 at 06:44 -0200, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> >the result was that Lua authors
> >added the LUA_USERCONFIG and lua_userinit hooks to lua.c in 5.0-alpha.
> 
> Much in the spirit of Lua :-)
> 
> Anyway, it may have gone unnoticed that it is pretty simple to
> compile 5.0-alpha to get support for DLL loading. It's a simple
> matter of uncommenting a line in config. The code for this resides
> in etc/, outside the core.

Aha!  That did go unnoticed, at least by me...  very cool; this is
pretty much what I wanted.  Well, actually I'd like to see code for
non-Unix platforms added as well, but I guess that will have to be
contributed; the important thing is to have a standard API on the Lua
side.

So, as a concept for a wiki page for binary modules, this is my
proposal:

* backport loadlib.c to Lua 4.0 (so that existing libraries can have
  modules), and make this available as a source patch

* provide lua.c-based interpreter binaries for popular platforms

* make the page, put up some modules

* Make a similar page for 5.0 when the time is right (i.e. when some
  libraries are available; for example in my case luaSDL needs tolua
  support)

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com