Re: Porting lua to a embeded platform

["Bogdan Marinescu" <bogdan.marinescu@...>]

I'd go with a minimal "ANSI porting layer" for your embedded platform.
This way you won't have to modify Lua itself, you'll be able to easily
apply patches and upgrade to new versions without problems.

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Ico Doornekamp <lua@zevv.nl> wrote:
>
>
> * On 2008-05-20 chunlin zhang <zhangchunlin@gmail.com> wrote  :
>
>> Many of the C runtime lib api could not be used in this platform
>> especially "stdio.h",i.e.: malloc/free/realloc printf/fprintf
>> fopen/fread/fwrite/fclose remove/rename/tmpfile(the platform have its
>> own file system api with UTF16 string parameter)
>
> That's a nasty platform you've got there.
>
>> I spent 1 night to compile lua into the platform.  And spent 2 day to
>> run "hello world"(using luaL_dostring) in the PC  emulator.  Spent 3
>> day to run "hello world" in mobile phone,because found that I  should
>> get rid of the C runtime api not support in the platform.
>>
>> And now I want to run lua script from file(using luaL_dofile),and
>> found  that I should rewrite luaL_loadfile and so on with platform
>> utf16 string  file system api.I think I will spend more days...
>>
>> Have anyone else ever done this kind of porting?Or any advice to me...
>
> I think there are generally two ways of porting Lua to a platform like
> yours: one is to just start compiling, find where the build breaks, and
> modify the Lua code to use your platform-specific API instead of the
> standard C library functions. This is a lot of work, and in the end
> leaves you with a severely modified Lua implementation, which will not
> make future updates any easier.
>
> The other (and IMHO preferred way) would be to leave the Lua source
> (mostly) unmodified, and implement the missing C library functions
> needed to get Lua up and running on a glue layer on top of your
> platform's API. Most of these C library functions aren't too hard to
> build on top of another filesystem (fopen/fread/fwrite, etc), and for
> the harder functions like [vs]printf() you might get away with
> implementing only a stub or part of the functionality.
>
> What method did you use for your Lua port ?
>
> --
> :wq
> ^X^Cy^K^X^C^C^C^C
>
>