Re: LuaBinaries and the RTL DLL for 5.2

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2010/1/15 Andrew Wilson <agrwagrw@gmail.com>:
> Generally I'd rather move to an open source compiler solution,I'd also
> like to get away from dependency on a specific MSVC runtime version.
> Is it possible to have MSWindows images that aren't dependent on a
> specific runtime version?

You can statically link in the C library, but you won't be able to
share objects managed by it (heap memory blocks, file handlers, etc.).
For memory that's not a problem since Lua frees itself all the memory
it allocates, and only that. For other objects it's up to the modules
to do it right (and I don't think extracting whatever C object is
embedded in a Lua 'file' userdata is a good idea).

> How broken is MSVCRT.DLL? Do these
> MSVCRT.dll issues cause real problems?

Problems can arise if you modules linked to different runtimes share
some C objects (e.g. file descriptors). Also not all runtimes are
pre-installed on all Windows, so that can be a deployment issue.