Re: Naked LUA

[Bogdan Marinescu <bogdan.marinescu@...>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Zomirp Cila <zomirp.cila@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm bothered with large footprint.
>
> I'm LUA fan for a decade now (introduced to me with Girder software) and
> this is the first time I think about porting.
> Anyway... what I need is interpreter or script engine to run on various
> platforms with lowest footprint as possible, 16kB max.
> Yes 16kB, but I have very few requests: I don't need provided libs or
> garbage collection. Loop control (for, while), conditionals (if, else),
> function calls, simple computing (only 32bit ints - add, sub, OR, AND, XOR)
> and native function calls are enough.
> OK, now that I've written them looks more that it seemed in my head... but
> still is a lot less than LUA provides.
>
> So... my question is can LUA be compiled bare naked, only execution flow
> parser without any libs (ie various type support)?

"Various type support" is part of core Lua, it doesn't have anything
to do with libraries. You can easily compile Lua without any library,
but changing the type system is a completely different story. Personal
experience suggests that if you want to interpret even a subset of the
Lua bytecode in 16k, you'll must likely need to rewrite the VM
completely.

Best,
Bogdan