LuaBinaries - why so many Win32 versions?

["Paul Moore" <p.f.moore@...>]

I want to allow users of my application which embeds Lua to load
external libraries (or at least, I thought I did until I started
looking at this!) but I'm confused by all the various LuaBinaries
available for Windows. A number of libraries claim to be "compatible
with LuaBinaries", but given the number of options, I can't see what
that means!

I can see why there are multiple .lib files corresponding to different
compilers, but it appears that the various Lua DLLs are linked with
different versions of the MSVC runtime. Does this mean that extensions
need to use the same CRT as well, so that an extension compatible with
(say) lua5_1_3_Win32_dll9_lib.zip is not compatible with
lua5_1_3_Win32_dll6_lib.zip?

If that's the case, I guess I have to leave CRT compatibility issues
to users (and accept the rish that if they get it wrong, the hosting
app may crash). Either that or use a static build of Lua and disable
dynamic loading.

Are there any other options I've missed?

Paul.