RE: Lua 4.1 Alpha and binary compilation

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>> >I thought I read once that Lua 4.1 was supposed to allow the 
>> >functionality of LuaC.exe to reside in the same Lua library used by 
>> >Lua.exe.  Is this true?  I want to binary compile (to bytecode) some 
>> >scripts generated at runtime on the Xbox
>> 
>> See luac/src/luac/ldumplib.c
>
>This looks like it'll work like a charm.

First, a simple correction: the file is src/luac/ldumplib.c.
And it is a tentative implementation.

Next, a clarification that may be useful to others: Lua 4.1 introduced two
new API functions: lua_loadfile and lua_loadbuffer. They are similar to
lua_dofile and lua_dobuffer, except that the chunks are not run but instead
are left on the top of the stack as ordinary functions. I think this was a
requeste maed in this list.

lua_dofile is now implemented using lua_loadfile. It's essentially
  lua_dofile(L, filename):
	lua_loadfile(L, filename)
	lua_call(L, 0, LUA_MULTRET);
except for error handling.

lua_loadfile and lua_loadbuffer have been exported to lbaselib as loadfile
and loadstring.

The ldumplib library simply adds a function called "dump" that takes a Lua
function and converts it to a (binary) string identical to the contents of
a file created by luac.

A bare bones luac could be written in Lua as write(dump(loadfile(f))).
--lhf