Re: Lua for Windows Platforms

["Antonio E. Scuri" <scuri@...>]

At 18:34 06/10/98 +0000, Michael T. Richter wrote:
>I'm building a set of Lua libraries as Win32/WinCE DLLs.  I want to
start
>making little applications for the WinCE platform and want a useful,
but
>small, "glue" language to use.  Lua fits the bill perfectly.

 I know that this is an old message, but I noticed that many developers are
doing the same vicious modification to the Lua source code. This probably
happens because the Visual C++ Help tell us to do so...

 The way we build Lua DLLs do not have to modify any of the source or
header files(*). We just create a ".DEF" with an "EXPORT" section on it,
listing the Lua exported functions.

 (*) But There are exported variables declared (lua_debug, lua_linehook,
and lua_callhook) that must have a control function declared (lua_setdebug,
lua_linehook, and lua_setcallhook), similar to the lua_setstate function. I
do not recommend using the variables directly. These new functions is a
strong suggestion to version 3.2.

 DLLs generation are not similar between compilers. The other suggested
approach seems not to work on Borland C++.

 Another very important setting is to use the run time library as a DLL (in
Visual C++ on your Project Settings select C/C++ Tab/Code Generation/Use
run time library and select Multhreaded DLL. This avoids many copies of the
C libraries on your application. Sure you have to make the same choice for
other DLLs you create for your application.

 (This is also compiler dependent, Borland C++ use it own C run time library)

 The problem related to Unicode characters is more complicated. And It is
not so simple as using float instead of double. If there is a standard
library that handles Unicode, so It is viable to change Lua code to support
Unicode. But making lots of if/defs in the code is not a very good approach
when smooth portability is desired. BTW, I like the idea of having an
Unicode version of the library.

 The FILE I/O problem in Windows CE seems to be easy to solve creating an
equivalent stdio/lib replacement. This should be done by Microsoft... In
fact, I do not have much time to dedicate my self to Windows CE, although I
wish to.

scuri