Re: Binary loadable modules

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

On Feb 25, 2003 at 01:00 -0800, Brian Hook wrote:
> Is there a status update for binary loadable modules in Lua 5?  I 
> just reread the thread on Thatcher's changes but that is for 4.01 
> only.

Ignacio posted a link to a beta version for Lua 5.  The luacheia
project is moving towards a Lua 5 based standard for modules; you can
look in CVS in sf.net/projects/luacheia, but it's not quite functional
yet.

> I'm trying to write a simple utility that requires access to a high 
> quality PRNG (Mersenne Twister), but which would otherwise run fine 
> within the Lua interpreted environment.  
> 
> 99.9% of the utility works great in Lua, but short of porting the 
> PRNG to Lua natively (which would be somewhat tedious since it relies 
> heavily on bit twiddling), I'll have to call into a native function, 
> which makes this package less portable than I'd like.
> 
> I'd like to be able to make this an easy distribution to get, and 
> requiring downloading Lua + "insert appropriate binary loadable 
> module for your system" is more work than "download Lua + these 
> scripts".
> 
> I'm fearful that it would be easier to just distribute everything as 
> a built EXE and using my own CLI that passes things to dostring().

My recommendation is: make your Mersenne Twister into a little binary
module, link it on the wiki, and then distribute the scripts (with Lua
+ loadmodule + Mersenne Twister binaries too, for extra easiness).
Hopefully we can integrate your module included in luacheia, to make
this even easier on users in the future.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com