Re: WinCE?

["Michael T. Richter" <mtr@...>]

> don't know if this has been asked before -- and i may even have done so
> ;) -- but has anyone ported Lua to WinCE devices?

I've tried and got bogged down.  Porting to a DLL-based Win32 library was 
relatively simple -- a matter of exporting the right functions and 
variables.  Moving it to Windows CE is non-trivial, however, for the 
following reasons:

1) File operations all use UNIX-style high-level file I/O (fopen, etc.).  
These functions aren't supported in the CRT supplied by Microsoft for CE.  
Just cutting out these functions isn't a useful way to handle things 
because error reporting is done using fprintf -- another unsupported 
function in Windows CE.

2) The native string type of Lua seems to be "array of bytes".  The native 
string type in Windows CE is Unicode.  This could present some problems 
down the line.

I got about half-way through resolving problem 1 before I had to return to 
stuff that pays my paycheque.  I'll get back to working on it probably 
sometime in January.

For the 3.2 release of Lua, I'd make these recommendations to the 
implementors:

1) Move as much of the I/O into contextual wrapper functions ("report 
error" or "write to file") as possible (and maybe even more than what is 
possible:-).  I believe this is already being worked on.

2) Provide compiler switches to allow for wide-character compilation.  It's 
necessary if Lua is to be internationalized anyway.

I have volunteered in the past in this very forum to work with the
implementors on making Lua Win32-friendly, but have received no reply.

-- 
Michael T. Richter    <mtr@ottawa.com>    http://www.igs.net/~mtr/
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