Re: Mike Pall's standalone FFI: a dream?

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

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 1:11 PM, Lorenzo Donati
<lorenzodonatibz@interfree.it> wrote:
> Of course, if Lua could do system API calls directly and there were a Lua
> _compiler_ that allowed to translate Lua code directly to exe files with no
> mandatory extra dependency, that would be sweet! :-)

Ah, but embedding Lua in a little Lua core is not difficult - have a
look at lhf's srlua.  And for larger multiple-file applications, there
is Mathew Wild's Squish which can knock an app into a single file.

Generally, doing system API calls directly is cool but only needed for
the most demanding of tasks.  One could bundle the necessary C
extension code with the srlua executable.  A clever tool could
generate the needed code and compile it all together.

What's nice about distributing little apps as Lua executables is that
they remain pretty small, less than 200K, which falls way below the
threshold of 'small' these days.

steve d.