Re: Is a Lua system easily embeddable?

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

2009/9/5 John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk>:
> What's needed is a generic "meta-executable" format that embeds a
> virtual file system and makes it available to a normal executable (in this
> case a Lua runtime) stored in the same file. Any examples of such systems I
> can find extract content out to temporary files, which rather spoils the
> point!

Shared libraries (DLLs, .so files, etc) have to be loaded from a place
the OS can locate them. So without some level of OS support, the type
of container you describe isn't possible (other than, as you say, by
extracting to temporary files).

I don't know of any OS support for loading DLLs from custom container
types (short of writing a user-level filesystem driver!) I would be
tremendously happy to be proved wrong, but I'd have expected the
technique to be better known if it existed.

Paul.