Re: Getting Started with Lua

[Peter Drahoš <drahosp@...>]

On 25 Jul, 2013, at 14:45 , Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:

> On 23/07/2013 13.08, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
>> The Getting Started page is now officially part of Lua's site at
>> 	http://www.lua.org/start.html
>> 
>> I'm sure it'll need improvement, but let's see how it fares.
>> 
>> There are links to it in the about and in the documentation pages,
>> and also of course in the site map (and in the recent changes page,
>> but who looks there? :-)
>> 
>> Thank you all for the suggestions, which are still welcome.
>> --lhf
>> 
>> 
> May I suggest to put a link somewhere to TDM GCC [1] somewhere in the instruction for building Lua on Windows?
> 
TDM GCC is a solid suggestion, the current LuaDist binaries[1] are built with it and so far there have been no issues with the distribution that are worth mentioning. However I would now recommend to switch over to the MinGW-builds[2] especially if you are aiming for 64bit releases with SEH exception handling[3] which is also suitable for LuaJIT. That is why upcoming LuaDist binaries will use MinGW-builds 4.8.1.

> It would help people which don't like/want or can't depend on MSVC tools, like OSS tools and/or are not too C-savy.
> 
The installation and use of the MinGW tools cannot be easier, unpack and add destination to PATH, there are also installers available. Another problem you will face on Windows is the lack of any decent make replacements if you do not want to use Msys(which I will not go into), for that purpose CMake[3] works well especially if the software aims to be portable to other platforms. This works well with Code::Blocks IDE or QtCreator

You can also follow the manual install instructions for LuaDist to get a basic environment going[7]. Alternatively you can just use the LuaDist binaries which should be enough to get you started with Lua on Windows.

pd

[1] http://www.luadist.org
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/
[3] http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/files/host-windows/releases/4.8.1/64-bit/threads-posix/seh/
[4] http://cmake.org
[5] http://www.codeblocks.org/
[6] https://qt-project.org/wiki/Category:Tools::QtCreator (QT SDK not required)
[7] https://github.com/LuaDist/Repository/wiki/LuaDist%3A-Installation