Re: Naked LUA

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

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Bogdan Marinescu
<bogdan.marinescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

.. and BTW, it's Lua, not LUA :)

Best,
Bogdan