Re: Proposal: smartlua

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

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Stefan Reich <info@luaos.net> wrote:
> First step to realizing smartlua: Let's collect example scripts you run all
> day.

Well, most serious people seem to be on some kind of Unix, so I'll
deal with the peculiar Windows challenges. The Windows shell is rather
crappy, but binary compatibility is easier (if you avoid proprietary
run-times); I can compile Lua with 32-bit mingw and be pretty
confident it will run on XP 32-bit and win 7 64-bit.  LuaBuild is a
factory that makes custom Lua executables, so that e.g. I can pack the
build tool Lake into a single executable, containing embedded
LuaFileSystem and winapi (for multitasking).  (Actually, the Linux
equivalent works pretty well, _if_ you build it on an older version of
libc - I keep an old Debian image around for this very task. Resulting
LB binaries seem to work just about anywhere, including FreeBSD with
Linux personality enabled)

But that's all really to solve the problem of bootstrapping stuff on
Windows, and then I must ask; would we not be reinventing existing
packaging systems?  Isn't this exactly the problem that LuaRocks and
LuaDist were meant to solve?  OK, it would be clever, and do static
analysis like Jay's soar to find out what is required.  But all the
fetching-and-deploying has pretty much been solved by LR and LD.

steve d.