Re: Hmm. Why no binaries? - an open letter to Mike Pall

[David Hollander <dhllndr@...>]

> For typical users, making binaries is difficult - it can easily too difficult to bother, so many will just go and use something else.

LuaJIT (and Lua) is quite possibly one of the easiest to compile C
programs I've seen... "make" and "make install" with no dependencies
to track down... quick compile time... I've been able to walk people
through it who have never programmed or used gcc before, so it seems
to be a very low barrier to entry.

I'd say what's more difficult, is explaining to novices what readline
is, why they can't repeat lines in the the interpreter, why LuaJIT
doesn't include readline by default, how to install "rlwrap", how to
setup a bash alias to open luajit with readline using rlwrap, etc.
That seems to be the trickier part of getting LuaJIT up and running
from people I have talked to.

- David

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 1:12 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@gmail.com> wrote:
>> About Windows (and in a similar matter OSX), it would be nice to have
>> precompiled binaries. But does it need to be Mike to do that? As an
>> OpenSource project anyone can stand up and cater for this.
>
> In fact, a couple of us have done this at the past; I vaguely remember
> doing so myself and I think Ignacio also.  Somebody should undertake
> to do this systematically and track the repo.
>
> steve d.
>
>