Re: Lua Alien library

[Duncan Cross <duncan.cross@...>]

2010/4/23 Attila <ejjeliorjarat@gmail.com>:
> Hello list!
> Some days before I asked about how to execute a command line command without
> the flashing shell, and there somebody pointed that I should use Alien
> library. So, I checked that out, and after it's documentation, it seems very
> promising. But on the LuaForge page I found _just_ the source code. Ok, I
> knew about a machine where MSVS08 is installed, so tried to compile it.
> After some days, I was able to do it, because I am not a C programmer, and
> it took a time while I noticed that it uses #ifdef WINDOWS and VS uses
> _WINDOWS. After I did these things, and compiled it, I tried it with Lua5.1,
> and the tests failed. First, require("alien") fails, because it excepts
> require("alien.core") (as I saw it in the .def file). Even if it loads the
> library, I am unable to use it, because on alien.load("libname") it throws
> an 'error'. By error I experienced: the Lua stand-alone writes an 'A' to the
> output, and a short message (stack traceback) about the line where I used
> load.
> I think (and it pertains for all Lua libraries) a precompiled form would be
> good, because many Lua programmer don't have C development environment. And,
> the documentation contains references to Linux OS, nothing about Windows, as
> well as the tests.
> I hope somebody can help me with it, and able to share a _working_ x86 dll
> with me, and can show me some examples, because it seems like I found the
> library which I need for my work :)
> Regards: Attila
>

Hi Attila,

There is a win32-x86 DLL package for Alien in the LuaRocks repository.
If you have not used LuaRocks before, there is info about how you can
make use of it at http://www.luarocks.org/ - but if you'd rather not
get into that at the moment and just want to download the Alien
package ASAP, read on.

Go to http://www.luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/ and click the
"win32-x86" link next to "0.5.0-1" on the right hand side of the Alien
section, near the top. Downline the .rock file, and rename its
extension from .rock to .zip - you can open it as a normal zip file.
The DLLs are found in the 'lib' directory, and the Lua component in
the 'lua' folder.

-Duncan