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

["Brownsword, Andrew" <brownsword@...>]

On 02.11.15 Steve Dekorte pressed the following keys:
> On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 12:13 PM, Pyrogon Public wrote:
> >I disagree.  Both implicit and explicit loading of shared libraries are
> >fairly common across a wide range of platforms.
> 
> Does this include game consoles, PDAs and cellphones?


My real point was that as an abstract notion this is probably a good thing, but it needs to be independent of any platform's notion of DLL.  This goes beyond whether or not it is *possible* to implement (or use) a DLL system on any given platform to whether an application wants to use such a system.  There are valid reasons to not do so.  I'd like to see Lua incorporate a method of adding language extensions, but make no assumptions about where the code being bound in comes from.  Currently we have to change the Lua distribution to extend the language, but this could be solved by an dynamic extension mechanism.  Support for specific platform DLL implementations can then be provided by code that isn't distributed as part of the core Lua library.