Re: Building lua on windows

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@acm.org> wrote:
> http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/luarocks-developers/2010-January/001408.html
> To compile C modules from source you are going to need the Windows Platform
> SDK, and the process is a little involved.

A good GCC version for Windows is the TDM mingw builds:

http://www.tdragon.net/recentgcc/

> I added mingw support for LuaRocks, but the mingw .lib file for the version
> of MSVCRT that Lua for Windows uses is a little flaky, and some Lua
> libraries fail to compile, so using the (free as in beer) MSVC is still your
> best bet.

In particular, luafilesystem.  If you build with gcc -lmsvcr80 then
some entry points are incorrectly named.

There is a hackish way to get around this, described in

http://lua-users.org/wiki/BuildingModules

(which BTW is an excellent resource)

(search for 'Using MinGW to build against LuaBinaries')

steve d.

PS. Ryan has been making noises about moving Lua for Windows to a mingw platform